Choosing to grow your winter garden in a greenhouse can extend garden life far beyond the first frost. A greenhouse will give your plants warmth and protection from extreme winter weather, allowing you to continue gardening through the year.
Winter Greenhouse Gardening: How to Best Prepare Your Greenhouse
Once you’ve installed your greenhouse in the best site possible, you also need to consider how you will design and prepare your greenhouse interior.
- Consider building a workspace inside the greenhouse. You can do your gardening work there, as well as store your tools, seeds, pots, or other items.
- Root crops will grow well in bins under tables that hold other types of plants. Make some space below as well as on top of things to maximize growing space.
- Most of your plants should be in containers or raised garden beds, so that they can be easily moved once the risk of freezing is over.
- To improve soil quality, you can grow a cover crop or a forage crop in the off season in your greenhouse beds (old roots will increase tilth, fertility, and humus.)
- For any compost or fertilizer you use, try to avoid use of nitrogen; especially in winter greenhouse light conditions, leafy green crops have the ability to accumulate unhealthy amounts of nitrites.
Winter Greenhouse Gardening: Keeping it Warm
While during the day, your greenhouse may be 20-40 degrees warmer than outside temperatures, at night the temperature inside will only be a few degrees higher than the outside temperature. Because of this, you may need to consider alternative methods of heating your greenhouse.
- For night temperatures around 50-60 degrees, you can inexpensively add some heat by leaving large rocks or buckets of water in your greenhouse. During the day, they will soak up heat, and at night, they will leak heat back to your plants.
- For night temperatures closer to freezing, you will probably need to invest in a small heater, designed specifically for greenhouses. It should heat your greenhouse at night without overheating your plants like a regular heater might.
Winter Greenhouse Gardening: Choose Your Plants
There is a variety of plants to choose from to plant in your winter greenhouse garden. Here are some of them:
- Winter vegetables: cabbage, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery, cilantro, beets, garlic, radishes, and turnips
- Winter flowers: Christmas cactus, freesia, pansy, primrose, amaryllis, azalea, hyacinth, larkspur, snapdragon, impatiens, and nasturtium
Winter Greenhouse Gardening: Maintenance
It’s also important to upkeep your winter greenhouse. Here are a few things you should remember:
- Your greenhouse plants will need to be watered more often than regular plants. If you put your finger one-inch deep into the soil and it is dry, your plant needs to be watered. Do not overwater your plants; standing water attracts parasites and disease.
- Keep your greenhouse roof free of snow. This will make sure there is still maximum sun exposure, as well as prevent damage to your greenhouse.
- Give your greenhouse some ventilation by propping open the doors during the day. This will keep your greenhouse from getting too hot.
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