A Greenhouse Lets You Carry On Gardening – Rain Or Shine

There is nothing to beat gardening as a hobby. You get all the exercise you need, and can tear up the health club card. By digging the ground, weeding and pruning, there is always something needing to be done. For stress relief, you can’t do much better. Gardening in the fresh air keeps you healthy, makes you look younger, and extends your life.

Whats more gardening can be a hobby for anyone. If you are confined to a wheelchair, then raised beds will let you grow and tend plants. Highly scented, or brightly coloured plants can make it an enjoyable jobby for those with fading eyesight. Gardening with a greenhouse will only improve matters.

There is nothing as satisfying as eating a tomato or carrot which you have grown from seed. Think about the satisfaction of sinking your teeth into an apple picked from a tree that you have raised from a cutting. Whilst you can do all this without a greenhouse, it is so much better with your own greenhouse. You will get even more satisfaction by building your own greenhouse

A greenhouse gives you a controlled environment, which should be free from pests and deseases. Making it much easier to raise plants from seed. It also permits you to grow exotic plants, melons and grapes that would normally not survive in cooler climates. With some planning, it will give you vegetables throughout the year.

The most important aspect of greenhouse gardening is to keep the house free of pests and diseases. Seeing your fresh produce decimated by pests or growing mold just days before you wanted to harvest it can be a really heartbreaking experience. Prevention is always better than cure and there are some things which will help to prevent most greenhouse problems.

Keeping everything clean is your first line of defense. If you see damaged plant material, such as a leaf with a dirty white or grey mould; pick it off immediately and burn it. Don’t allow your tools to spread diseases to other plants. Always dip secateurs and other tools in disinfectant after using them on diseased plants. Sounds simple, but many people forget this and worry that the mould is indemic.

Good ventilation will help prevent a great many of the problems. A higher humidity will also help with attacks of red spider mites although this could cause other problems. There are also parasiitic mites which you can also introduce which will cure this problem.

It is always a mistake to quickly add heavy chemical controls to solve pests and diseases. The residue will last long after you have  cropped the infected plants and could cause illness. Organic and Biological controls are generally to be favoured. Many cures are totally safe to use, such as yellow sticky cards hung in the greenhouse to catch flying pests that are greatly attracted to them. A less messy way of curing white fly, however is to introduce biological control in the form of a parasitic wasp.

Don’t let all this talk of pests and diseases put you off greenhouse gardening. Most people who have greenhouses experience very little in the way of problems, and those they do have are minor enough to be easily cured with very little intervention.
Unless you are aiming at achieving absolut maximum crops, you can usually just accept a few loses to pests and disease, and just live with the pests naturally.