Finally, after planning, purchasing and perhaps even erecting it yourself, your greenhouse is up! However, before you grab your trowel and get planting, spare a few minutes identifying any other greenhouse accessories that you may need, to help you get the most out of your greenhouse gardening! As well as the obvious gardening tools, here’s a quick checklist of six items that could well prove to be the greenhouse equivalent of the latest must-have fashion item!
1) Thermometer:
Digital or mercury, a thermometer is an essential item to ensure that conditions in your greenhouse are optimum for your plants, particularly if you are growing specialist plants. There are plenty on the market to choose from, but do consider that a digital thermometer can be much easier to read in the humid atmosphere of a busy greenhouse, especially if you want that at-a-glance information.
2) Greenhouse insulation:
Insulation isn’t just about keeping things warm in your house! Just as you’d tuck your children up warmly on winter nights, so should you consider ‘tucking up’ your seedlings and dormant plants! An unheated greenhouse can be kept frost-free by greenhouse insulation, whilst insulating a heated greenhouse can maximise the effect of greenhouse heaters, which therefore become more economical to run.
3) Seed trays and covers:
Always useful for starting off your seeds, a stack of these are not just useful, but if you buy quality items the first time around, you could recycle these indefinitely, giving you extra value for money. Perhaps if you are not too worried about this as you know you will be giving some seedlings away, seed trays can be cheaply provided by re-using food trays that food items come from the supermarket in, just wash carefully first and use as either bases or covers! Adding covers to your trays will help to propagate plants and give additional warmth for optimum germination conditions and to prevent frost.
4) Lighting and power:
If you’ve installed your own greenhouse, then you will probably have dealt with the issue of lighting or power at an early stage, but if you have inherited a powerless greenhouse as part of a new home, it is really worth considering adding outdoor power. Kits that include weather-proof switches and sockets can be readily obtained from greenhouse supplies outlets and many can be legally fitted by a non-specialist (but do read all instructions carefully).
5) Propagator:
If you have power but don’t want the expense of heating the whole greenhouse, a plug-in propagator can be the ideal solution for allowing warmth to seedlings that need it, or for larger, more specialist plants. Mostly working on a heated mat basis, there is a whole range available, starting from $29 to well over $100 (Amazon.com), for fixed or variable temperature models.
6) Labels:
It sounds obvious, but do make sure you have a stock of plant labels and a permanent marker, so that you can identify your seedlings at all times! However good your memory, there will be times where you just can’t quite be sure what’s where, or when a ‘helpful’ pair of hands has moved things around: the last thing you want is to have painstaking labelled everything with a dry-wipe marker and then lost the information at the first round of watering! To be able to function effectively as a grower, you need to keep tabs (literally) on what is what and where it is!
Of course, your own essential garden accessories will relate to the vegetation you are growing so pick and choose from the above and decide on anything else that fits your needs, then it’s happy and productive planting all the way!
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