Saturday, April 24, 2010

4 weeks on

I'm not going to have time to ruminate more on building a greenhouse out of windows in this post, since I'm busy with law school finals (last semester!), so I'll just update with the progress of the plants, since it's been 4 weeks today that I put the plants in the greenhouse.
To start, the tomatoes are ranging from about 15" tall to 22". The sugar snack and brandywine are growing the most vigorously at this point, but the early girl seems to be catching up. The better boy has yet to show its teeth but I still reckon when all is said and done it will produce some awesome tomatoes. All of the tomato plants have a couple sets of flowers on them, so I'm going to switch to bloom nutrients this week. Here are pics:

I put my child in front of them to try to give them some scale.



All 6 of my baby girls. They grow up so fast!



My sugar snack and brandywine. Both about 22" and growing a half inch per day. It's amazing how different the leaves on the heirloom brandywine look from all the other tomatoes. I wonder if I'm going to regret not choosing varieties specifically bred for greenhouse use.




The melons are looking good as well. They have anywhere from 11-15 nodes at the time, and they're starting to get into the range where I can let them flower. I'm also at the point with these that I'm going to switch nutrients. I really like watching these things grow.




...And now for something completely different. On Tuesday I finished my latest section of wall (just past the arch), and on Thursday I built a raised bed by sinking stones vertically into the ground. Then I laid some red plastic and planted them (apparently red plastic reflects the right kind of light to give tomatoes improved yields, but the literature is conflicting).


Here are the pepper plants we recently planted in the raised bed to the left. This is where we planted tomatoes last year.



Here are some of the sweet charlies (strawberries) that are on the terracing around the cistern. They seem very vigorous.



Here are the beds of strawberries we put in back in the fall of 2008.





Sunday, April 11, 2010

Putting on Shadecloth


Before I get started on this, I wanted to tell anyone who reads this (lol wut readers?) that I'm going to write my next post on some semi-comprehensive web research on how to build a greenhouse out of recycled windows and other materials. Obviously I'm not an expert, but there have been a lot of people who have tried this and similar projects with varying results. I'll try to put on a lot of links and what I think about the various resources.
Now, on account of how hot I anticipate this summer getting, I ordered some aluminet shade cloth from gemplers.com. I also ordered some of these hinged grommets.


I cut the shade cloth to size and hemmed the sides (my wife did this!) and stretched a piece across the south side and the roof. I put in screws, leaving the head a half inch from fully embedded, to act as anchors. The shadecloth is 50%, and already yesterday (sunny and 66 degrees) I noticed that the air in the greenhouse was not heating nearly as fast. The greenhouse now looks even more like a futuristic spaceship.



Those are strawberry beds in the foreground.



I don't anticipate covering much more window space in in shadecloth, since most of the worst spots are now covered, and since many of the remaining window spaces can be opened (though I guess I could make it so that they could be opened with shadecloth applied if I was careful on the tailoring side). I might place individual pieces on a window on the west wall and one on the east wall, but I'm going to wait and see what happens on an 85 degree day before I take those steps.

I'm probably going to order a new 12" variable speed exhaust fan from www.littlegreenhouse.com because I don't think the fan I have installed has nearly enough power to turn the air over in the greenhouse quickly enough. Since tomatoes won't fruit and start to become damaged at prolonged temperatures above 93 degrees, I'm going to have to need all the help I can get from an exhaust fan to keep growing through July and August.

When I started this venture I thought operating a greenhouse was all about keeping things warm, but I've quickly figured out that at least here in Kentucky, 6 months out of the year it will be all about keeping the damn thing cool enough. Right now in my heat-fighting repertoire I have a 650 cfm evaporative cooler, which will be a big help on the hottest days where I can't cool the overall ambient temperature enough with the fan and shadecloth. I also have 8 windows that can be opened if you count the slide on the door. The problem is that none of the windows open on the south side. Oh well. If I buy the new exhaust fan I'll be guaranteed to have an air exchange that ranges from 1100 to 550 cfm. The worst case scenario is that all of these measures won't be enough to cool the greenhouse on a 95 degree day and then my only real options will be to buy a higher percentage shade cloth (like 80%) or to build a fogger to mist water into the air. I'd rather not cut out more light with a denser shadecloth, and building a fogger sounds like a risky proposition, b/c I haven't made everything in the greenhouse water proof, and have electrical stuff all over the floor. I'd have to come up with a solution for that before trying to build a fogger. Not to mention the $$$ it will cost, and that I basically don't have any more $$$ to spend on it. I'm so over-budget I feel like a government contractor. Add that problem to the fact that I have no experience with foggers and I don't have the slightest clue how to build an effective one, and that's my last ditch option.

I also checked my ph for the first time in a while and discovered it was way up there, between 7 and 7.5. Apparently the best range to be in is 5.8-6.2. I hadn't worried about it for a while because the plants looked so good. Maybe things will start to look even better now that I've fixed it. In any case here are what the plants look like now.





I also put my other plants that are going in the ground in a few weeks in the greenhouse:




I ordered more plant yoyos from www.bghydro.com but after 5 days they have YET to ship them. I am severely disappoint.
My face (not literally) when I saw that they hadn't shipped them yet.





Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Tomatoes kicking into gear

My tomatoes (or at least 3 or 4 out of the 6) are starting to kick into gear. Yesterday was pretty humid and not so hot (78) that my fans and evaporative cooler couldn't cool things down a bit. I ordered some aluminet shade cloth which I'll have to cut to size and put in grommets to fasten it to the greenhouse. It's a 50% shade factor so hopefully it'll help me keep the temps down on the 95 degree days this summer. I also for the first time really opened all the windows that I could. Here is a pic with all the windows open.


A view from the window looking in:


A few tomato plants. The one to the left is a brandywine. It already has the beginnings of flowers.


Here are my melon plants. As you can see I've already hooked them up to the ceiling to train them straight up. They already have flowers on them.



Here are my peppers plants. The one on the left is a blockbuster hybrid (bell pepper) and the one on the right is a jalopeno plant.



Friday, April 2, 2010

Putting plants in the greenhouse

I started plants from seed about four weeks ago on March 2nd or 3rd. Here is a pic of two of my tomato plants.



Here are three other tomatoes.



Here is a pic of my melon plants. One is a cantaloupe and one is honey dew.



So I'll take this chance to explain what the hell I'm doing here. Look up at that second picture of the three tomato plants. What I did was to start the seedlings in a little "plug" in a styrofoam raft system. Once they outgrew that, I put them in the cubes which are wrapped in white plastic. Those cubes are made out of rockwool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_wool
I did this for all the plants I planned on putting in the greenhouse. (6 different tomato plants, 2 pepper plants (blockbuster bell pepper, and jalopeno pepper, and two melon plants). Those are wrapped on the sides (to keep moisture from being exposed to sunlight and thus facilitating algae growth), but are open on the bottom so the roots can grow into the rockwool slabs that are in the trays. So the individual trays (I've got 4 of them running) are 3 feet long each, and I'm putting three plants in each one. I left the plastic on the top of them (cut out the bottom plastic for drainage) for the same reason: to avoid algae growth. Algae growth will change the ph of the nutrient solution very quickly, reducing the nutrient uptake by the plants.

The black plastic hose line you see is the input line. There is a 10 gallon rubbermaid container under the benches holding the plants. In the container I have a water pump that is periodically (15 minutes out of every hour during the day, and every two hours at night) programmed to deliver nutrient solution to the plants by offshoots of quarter inch hose straight into the individual rockwool cubes. Then the solution drains to the bottom, into the tray, and is piped back into the nutrient tank (fed by gravity).

In order to allow the roots go from the cubes into the slab, I cut out sections of the plastic and placed the cubes on the slabs. 5 days after putting the plants in the greenhouse (I did that on March 27th), the roots of some of the plants are already busting through the bottom of the cubes and probing into the rockwool slabs. Eventually, the three plants will share the entire slab and their roots will completely fill of all of the available area, allowing me to grow gigantic plants.

You might be asking, how will I keep the plants upright? Well, I'm going to train them up to the ceiling, growing them vertically. I'll do this by attaching them to a string which is hooked to the ceiling with a retracting mechanism which will keep the line taught as the tomato or melon plants grows vertically. I'm also going to grow cucumbers like this but I haven't started them yet (b/c I spaced on it. I still haven't planted them. /facepalm)


Thursday, April 1, 2010

Finished Greenhouse

This post is just for pictures of the (basically) finished product. This was in late February.



I took this in the past few days.



That's it. I'll save the next post for all the explanation and pictures of the hydroponics system inside and the plants.

Filling all the leftover holes

So before I start this section, I'd like to say that if anyone does end up reading this blog, you can ask me whatever questions in the comments, whether it be about how I built the greenhouse, hydroponics, or greenhouse maintenance. Also, if you have any advice, please share it, because I'm certainly not an expert at any of this.
This post deals with all the holes I had to fill before the greenhouse was essentially done. I did this work from early January to mid to late February. It is important to note that I didn't plan how to fill these holes ahead of time. I just handled each individual blank space as a different problem, and thus came up with different solutions. In every wall of the greenhouse, the windows we had installed were not enough to make a solid wall. The openings varied widely in size.

Like this one.



And this one on the south wall (from the inside). Those bottles at the bottom show where the opening was (sorry no good pic from when it wasn't yet filled up). There was a 4 inch wide vertical space that I needed to fill.


With different blank spaces I decided to do different things. With the south facing wall, I chose to fill the vertical space with bottles and mortar.



This is what it looks like from the inside.



On the east facing wall, I put a fan in the upper corner, and had a local glass shop cut some pieces to size to make a long triangular double paned window out of 2x4''s.
Here is the fan.





And this is the window and the fan both put in.



I also had glass cut to make a small window on the north side. I may end up tearing this window out if the small fan I have fails to do a good job of air exchange, and I'll put a 16'' fan in this space. Hopefully it won't come to that.



On the north side at the bottom, I mortared in large pebbles, stones from a local creek, and brick pieces that I had found in the ground, apparently from the construction of the house I live in (back in the late 50's I think.) Of course I haven't done the acid wash to clean off extra mortar yet, but it's basically done.


I did the same with the four openings on the west wall. You'll notice there is a pattern from the bricks common to both openings. Four half bricks and one whole brick in the middle.


I also had two odd openings at the top of the western wall. So I filled them with stone and mortar. Good idea? Who knows.


I had never mortared anything with stone, but I once worked as a hodpacker on a brick crew composed entirely of Mexicans (there was one white guy for a time (Ray) who essentially lived out of his car). From mixing the mortar, hauling the bricks, and placing the mortar for the brick layers, I knew some of the basic principles, but I didn't realize exactly how much I knew, because it was all theoretical before I laid my first brick. I had never handled a trowel and actually laid brick, but once I started, it was as if I could remember the sounds of scraping mortar across the bricks and from the edging work (9 years ago). So apparently you can just watch or apparently listen to anything for long enough and basically learn it. In any case, I felt like I could get pretty good at brick work or mortared stone work reasonably fast.
As far as windows go, I don't know that I possess such an art. I wouldn't count myself as a decent carpenter. And carpentry seems like a big part of making windows. For some reason it doesn't excite me to work with wood as much as it does stone. This is perhaps because I do not comprehend the myriad possibilities inherent in woodworking (when one has the right tools). But wood is relatively fleeting compared to stone. However, I'm not sure this justifies my shoddy carpentry work. I am learning, I just have no passion for it.

And for the hell of it, here is a recent pic of my garden wall. BTW, I need to build 8-9 feet of wall this weekend. Anyone want to learn?




Putting on the roof.

For the roof I just went to Lowes and got 2x12' tufftex polycarbonate panels. I think they were about $30 per panel, and I got 6 or 7 of them. It was a reasonably easy job to do once it got going.

Here we were about to get started.


Here we are putting on the first panel:



My brother puts on the third panel:


My brother and Lang getting the next to last one on.



Completed roof.