Mark Freeman - Gardening in Your Greenhouse

To Mary Louise Freeman-Lynde, better known as Molly, who has her great-grandmothers green thumb.

Copyright 1998 by Mark Freeman

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS

5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6

F IRST E DITION

Cover design by Wendy A. Reynolds

Cover line drawing by Heather Bellanca

Cover photo by Anne B. Freeman

Turf-Spray Home and Garden Sprayer Model 2501 inphotograph used with permission of Chapin Manufacturing, Inc.

The logos on the illustration onused with permission of Bentley Seeds Inc., Charles C. Hart Seed Co., and Shepherds Garden Seeds

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freeman, Mark, 1927

Gardening in your greenhouse / Mark Freeman ; illustrations by Heather Bellanca 1st ed.

p. cm. (Greenhouse basics)

Includes .

ISBN 0811727769

1. Greenhouse gardening. 2. Greenhouses. I. Title. II. Series: Freeman, Mark, 1927 Greenhouse basics.

SB415.F 74 1998

635.9'823dc21 98-4842

CIP

ISBN 978-0811727761

eBook ISBN: 9780811740531

Contents

Preface

I live and garden some thirty miles from Bennington, Vermont, at an elevation approximately 600 feet above sea level. The U.S. government says we are in Growing Zone 4; in general I agree. The average dates of last and first frosts here are May 10 and September 20, which gives us a growing season of 132 days. Our average annual percentage of possible sunshine is 53; in the three darkest months (November through January), we receive only 43 percent of possible sunshine.

In discussing greenhouse, and some outdoor, gardening conditions in this book, I have tried to allow for those who live in milder or harsher climates, but you may have to adjust some of my advice to make it applicable to your climate. To find out what zone you live in, check a good gardening encyclopedia; some seed catalogs also contain zone information.

To find out about your local insolation, which is the percentage of possible sunshine that you receive each month, see . A good almanac, like the Old Farmers Almanac, will tell you how many hours of sunlight are possible on any given day where you live, or at least at the nearest large city. If youve had a solar home or greenhouse for several years, you may already have a gut feeling for this; for example, weve known for years that its really dark here in November but that we get a lot of sunlight in February.

SOME NOTES ON STYLE

The editorial we used to have a purpose, in that it added some dignity to a piece of written work. Now, when every semieducated pro athlete and race car driver uses it, as in We are going to examine all our options before we decide to sign the contract, it cries out for the response Have you got a frog in your pocket? The author prefers the straightforward I. Where we is used in this book, it refers to some group of people, often but not always the author and his family.

I have found no good term in common use for home greenhouse owners. For this reason, I have coined the word greenhousers for those who own and work in a noncommercial greenhouse. It is a homely word, but it serves the purpose.

I have tried to use common names for plants in this book, with certain exceptions. In discussing vegetables, I use terms such as brassica and Solanaceae to avoid the vaguer terms cabbage types, which some might not know includes turnips, and tomato family, which also includes peppers and eggplants. I have given the Latin as well as the common names for all houseplants because they have a bewildering variety of common names. For example, what you may know as Patient Lucy somebody else calls Busy Lizzie. In many cases, such as coleus, the Latin name also is the common name.

All temperatures mentioned in this book are Fahrenheit. I have nothing against progress, but I have yet to meet a greenhouser in the United States who uses a Celsius thermometer, and a good many Canadians I know are just as comfortable with Fahrenheit as Celsius. If you arent, I apologize, but youll just have to use a conversion table.

If by any chance you are reading this book before constructing your own home greenhouse, I urge you to read the earlier book in this series, Greenhouse Basics: Building Your Own Greenhouse, because many of the ideas that follow work best in a greenhouse built according to the principles in that book.

I want to thank Laura McDermott, mentor of the Washington County Master Gardeners, and all the Master Gardeners who helped me with information and advice, especially Debbie Bailey. John Gail of Stokes Seeds provided a great deal of information about vegetable varieties for greenhouse growing, and Tim Kavanaugh of Rice Seeds helped me understand the seed industry in general and the problems of small seed companies in particular. Mike Taylor taught me a lot about houseplants and their use in large public buildings like hotels.

I could not have written this book, or anything else, without the help of my wife, Anne, who criticizes (in the true sense), corrects, proofreads, folds and staples, but does not mutilate, and is the worlds best speller.

Introduction

A lthough you wouldnt know it from the mass media, as we enter the twenty-first century the fastest-growing recreational activity in America may benot playing with a home computerbut gardening. Growing things in the backyard has always been a popular activity, and a necessity for some, but gardeners today are branching out into areas regarded as exotic by many a generation ago.

There are gardening books less than twenty-five years old that recommend the use of large quantities of DDT and other poisons as the solution to all pest problems. Today it is not necessary to identify oneself as an organic gardener; those who do not use compost and other natural fertilizers or who try to control pests and diseases with chemicals are now considered to be the oddballs, as organic gardeners were a quarter century ago.

In addition to practicing organic gardening, the majority of todays gardeners seek out plants and growing systems long considered exotic. Who today doesnt grow leeks and cilantro? Who doesnt know about raised beds and no-till systems? Herbs like rosemary and tarragon are common in home gardens; to be unusual today, you have to grow hyssop and lovage.

Granted, some home herb growing, like some organic gardening, is a fad, but there is a large core of determined gardeners who simply have found that herbs make food taste betterand may do at least as much for your health as the cold remedies and antacids found in drugstores. They like the taste of plum tomatoes and blue potatoes. They have found through trial and error that ladybugs control aphids better than malathion does and that cow manure is superior to 5105 from a factory. And theyre not about to go back to the old ways.

And then theres greenhousing. It began because many of us lived too far north to start tomatoes from seed outdoors or to eat lettuce out of the garden in December. We bought tomato and pansy plants at the local supermarket in the spring, tomatoes and lettuce at the same place in the winter. The taste of the produce didnt compare with what we grew ourselves, in season, and we discovered that what we ate, as well as the plants we bought to set out, had been liberally laced with chemicals. Besides, even the garden supply stores didnt sell Principe Borghese tomato plants, and the supermarket lacked arugula. (That last is only partly true today, when every small-town supermarket has exotic produce unknown to our parents, but we still dont know what its been sprayed with.)