A greenhouse is the perfect place to start those seeds and nurture those tender seedlings until they are strong enough to survive the rigors of the outdoors. The type of controlled environment a greenhouse can provide is difficult to duplicate, and that is perhaps why greenhouses are such coveted additions to any gardeners toolkit.

Greenhouses can be particularly great for fall and winter gardening, especially in those areas of the country where the cool weather sets in early. A greenhouse can provide a heated and well controlled environment in which those plants can be nurtured through the cold weather months. In addition, a greenhouse can help the gardener save money in the long run, by allowing more plants to be started from seed. Starting plants directly from seed is generally much less costly than purchasing seedlings from a nursery, so in the long run a greenhouse may end up paying for itself.

When designing a greenhouse for your landscape, it is important to look not only at the structure of the greenhouse itself, but to plan carefully for how heat and water will get to the greenhouse. A greenhouse must be a controlled environment, and that means controlling such factors as heat and humidity. It is also important for the greenhouse to be located in a part of the landscape that gets plenty of natural sunlight. This natural light will help make the plants grow and thrive, even in the winter, and reduce the need for costly and complicated supplemental lighting.

Even though a greenhouse is great for fall and winter gardening, the best time to set up a new greenhouse is in the early spring. Setting the new greenhouse up at this time of year will help to guarantee that the greenhouse will be full of flowers, vegetables and other plants by the time the summer gardening season is in full swing. Those well started plants can then easily be transplanted into the outdoor garden, where they can be enjoyed all year long.

Large commercial greenhouses have all of this automated. All of the plant’s needs and wants are stored in a computer program and are being met. When they are hungry, the computer gives them food and when they are cold, the computer turns on the heater. The computer knows best and in the end the result is greater harvest of crops, plants or flowers.

When you use a hydroponic greenhouse, you can increase the yield of a crop drastically. When you could normally harvest one time a year, in a hydroponic greenhouse you can harvest maybe 3 or 4 times a year. That is a minimum growth in harvest of 300%. When using chemical fertilizers, you should be seeing more success than with plain soil.

You maybe wondering that is the food that you eat from a hydroponic greenhouse healthy? The answer is YES! It is healthy. Many nutritionists have already proven so many times that crops from a hydroponic greenhouse are safe and healthy, and that is because the plants only take in fertilizers when in a organic state.

The wide spread use of chemical fertilizers could be the death of soil because of the difference in breaking down the organic composition. When you want to fertilize your soil, you have to keep in mind that you need to take the proper organic steps to feed the soil, so that it produces enough organic fertilizer that is needed to produce the nutrients. It could even be that organic gardening may not deliver the needed nutrients at all.

When you put chemical fertilizers into the soil, keep in mind that you are going to effect your soil and this may not always be in a good way. Micro-organisms will die because of the chemicals that you have added to your soil and when this happens, you will have to use fertilizers forever. If you don’t, plants will not grow and this is because of the chemical fertilizers you have used.

There are a lot of experts that realize that the use of chemical fertilizers for growing plants is not a good thing for the environment, because most of these fertilizers are made out of petroleum products and these products are harmful for the environment. But this is the choice we have to make, because if we don’t use chemical fertilizers, we can’t produce enough food to feed us all and if we do use them, we are destroying the environment.

Lets talk about misting.

Ventilation and shading are very important factors when it comes to overheating the climate in the greenhouse, but a proper control of the humidity or so called greenhouse misting is the main factor for a comfortable environment for cultivating your plants. Evaporation cools down the greenhouse by turning liquid water into a form of gas. When you start to ventilate your greenhouse you’ll be losing all that moisture because it will vanish into air. With misting you can replace that moisture.

How much moisture you need to maintain your greenhouse depends on a number of factors. These factors are your local weather, how ventilated your greenhouse is and how much shading you have provided.  There is a rule of  thumb which says that for every 10 square feet of greenhouse, there should be 1-2 gallons per hour of moisture.

If you have a good misting system then you should have no problem distributing the moisture evenly over the greenhouse. It will also distribute the water so that the plants in the greenhouse don’t get soaked. If done right misting can bring back the temperature to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, which is around 14 degrees Celsius.

Facts about misting systems:

-You can place a misting system to disperse water in a very fine mist or in a coarse spray. It depends on the measurement of the droplets on the nozzle and the water pressure.

-Most of the misting systems are connected to pumps that are designed for intermittent or continuous duty. The intermittent pumps are built to spray water every 5 minutes and rest 60 seconds between misting.

-The newer misting systems come with timers that you can program to mist between 1 and 24 times a day, and each misting can take up to 24 minutes. This system will take a lot of manual work out of the greenhouse owner’s hands.

-You can calculate the amount of water you need to maximize the efficiency of your misting system. It can be calculated by multiplying the nozzle flow per minute by the number of nozzles you have in your system and the outcome of that calculation needs to be multiplied again by the operating moisture per day of your misting system. In this way you can have a good estimate of how much water you are going to need for the system.

-If you do not want a misting system then there is another solution and that is an evaporative cooler. These coolers preform really well in dry climates where humidity is below 50%. An evaporative cooler will cool the air by 10 to 20 degrees with the use of the water that has been drawn through the cooler. Keep in mind that too much humidity is never good for your plants (or you must be growing plants from the rain forest).

-If you use a cooler or a misting system you will need a tool which can measure the humidity inside your greenhouse. It will keep you informed about the level of humidity.

There are so many factors you need to take into account when you start growing plants in your greenhouse and misting is just one of them, but nevertheless it should not be underestimated as it will provide the much needed cooling for your plants. Using a misting system can really boost the quality of your harvest by 20%.