Greenhouse Tricks

let's do something interesting today today we're going to talk about cheap little tricks you can do to your greenhouse that'll make your life a lot easier and let you grow a lot more so what do i mean about cheap tricks well let's start off by saying this is for small greenhouses now it will work on larger ones but this is for the person that's got a 200 to 800 square foot greenhouse kit in their backyard and they want to do some cool stuff to it that will enable them to grow more grow better and grow earlier in the season later in the season and possibly even four seasons so when we talk about cheap tricks we're not talking about the band we're talking about awesome things you can do to your greenhouse that'll make it work better last longer and grow you better and more food simpletech that's the name of this channel and we have piles of videos on greenhouses and growing in our archives now most people sit there and say okay you got to sign up and subscribe because we're going to bring you all kinds of videos guess what we have them they're in our archives you can go check them out after you watch this video of course we're going to be making new ones too but if you want to look at an extensive library that's completely free hit that subscribe button and check out our previous videos and if you like them hit like the first cheap trick i'm going to hook you in on is something that i bought from amazon and it's a thermostat and a thermostat is pretty self-explanatory you have one in your house and it turns the heater on when you hit a certain temperature turns it off when it gets to the right temperature it does the same thing with your air conditioner it keeps your house within a specific range that's comfortable well you can have the exact same thing for your greenhouse they have thermostats that just work with a plug so it turns on and off the electricity to your heater or fans or cooling system when you want it within a specific temperature range so this is not something that's super expensive i mean it's under 40 bucks you can buy it from amazon they'll ship it to virtually anywhere in the world and it makes your life a lot better because if you can control the temperature in your greenhouse because they get hot they get cold and you need things turned on and off by specific temperatures well that makes everything work next i'm going to talk about orientation of your greenhouse so unless you have a dome most people have something that's similar to a hoop house either it's a hoop house or it's a passive solar design or a chinese design or something like that if this is what you have you need to have the orientation east west and you can see that in the diagrams that i have here the reason for that isn't summertime it's spring fall and winter especially in northern climates and this is a huge thing for northern climates to have an east-west orientation that east-west orientation will allow you to insulate your north wall and get sun on your plants all day now if you can reduce the amount of transparent area you can actually have more insulation more insulation means you can hold more heat in the cold weather this is a good thing this is something heat is expensive and you lose an enormous amount of heat through even the best transparent materials so if you can reduce the amount of transparent material you have with an east-west orientation by insulating your north wall that's a win so probably the most important thing in a greenhouse is the transparent material so you need to be able to have something like glass like polycarbonate like plastic poly that the light can get through and protect your plants from the environment this is why we're using a greenhouse in the first place so that you can grow into weather situations that normally wouldn't allow your plants to grow and you can control the environment a lot more so when we're talking cheaper little greenhouses the best thing you can do well the majority of them for one are made out of poly plastic poly the best thing you can do is figure out how to get double inflated poly and add an air blow so double inflated air blown poly if properly secured will give you an enormous amount of strength and about an r2 insulation value it'll give you better insulation than double polycarbonate and on par or better than glass double pane glass not single pane so an air blower is and adding an extra layer of poly is a greenhouse trick that is extremely important to look at the blowers use very little electricity many of them are 30 40 watts i mean this is half of an old style light bulb and it doubles triples quadruple the strength because my air blown poly greenhouse has stood up to 130 kilometer hour winds the wind just bounces off of it like a big cushion the next simple trick that we need to talk about is insulation now there's two places where insulation really matter in a small greenhouse especially if you have the east-west orientation one is the north wall the north wall doesn't get any light on an east-western orientation so you might as well insulate it and a step up from that is even to put some sort of reflective material on it so that the light that does get through the plants bounces back and helps the plants even more the second place that's usually overlooked is the floor now when you insulate the floor you're going to be growing in beds or buckets but a lot of people are doing that anyway with a greenhouse so if you insulate the floor you have to realize how much surface area that actually is if you calculate it the floor is often a third of the surface area of your greenhouse and if you're in a cold climate that's a lot of cold coming up if you add some insulation to that i mean you can go step up and even add some sand on top of the insulation with a radiant floor and some concrete blocks on top that'll hold a little bit of heat during the day but just insulating the floor adds an enormous factor to you in retaining heat which allows you to go earlier in the spring and later in the fall i can't stress enough how important this next one is that you actually value your time sure it's great to water your plants and to get out to your greenhouse with the hose and play with your little babies and see how they're growing but it gets old and if you're starting to get over 200 square feet you got four or five six hundred square feet of greenhouse you got a lot of plants you can grow a lot in that greenhouse so if you have to water everything in that greenhouse especially when it gets big daily that's a lot of time so the solution to that i mean other than wicking pots but even when it they get big the wiki pots have to be watered once a day is an automatic watering system now these are cheap on amazon they're not expensive and you set it up to your water whatever type of watering system you have in your greenhouse whether you have a hose that's brought in or whether you've got some sort of underground water system that comes in that's plumped in i really hope you're not watering your greenhouse just by pots because that's a lot of time i mean once you get to a certain size you have to have either a hose or a plumbed in system to water your greenhouse and once you have that you need an automated watering system to get water to your plants automatically every day so that you're only just quickly checking to see if it's putting too much or too little water into your plants so if you have your greenhouse up and running and you've gone through the summer or you've gone through fall or spring you're going to realize that they don't regulate temperature the same way as a house you need to be on top of what's happening temperature wise in your greenhouse to take care of your plants at night during the day these things heat up and they can heat up way too much or they can get way too cold way too fast so what you need to have is a thermostat and not just any thermostat you need a thermostat that works with wi-fi or bluetooth or something that's remote that can access your phone through an app and you can have alarms on it so it will tell you when your greenhouse is too cold when your greenhouse is too hot if one of your automated systems for heating or cooling isn't working because if you can get on top of that before time sets in and your plants are exposed to either way too cold temperatures or way too hot temperatures you're not going to lose your crop you're going to keep your crop and you're going to have much better produce so a thermostat that works on an app with your phone is nowadays essential and something i bet people wish they had years and years ago okay this is something that's overlooked a lot and what it is is battery backup now when i talk about having battery backup there's a couple of things that seriously need to be battery backed up number one is your air blower on your double inflated poly if that goes down because of a hydro outage or a electrical company or as we call high electrical company hydro here in manitoba but so if your electrical company has a power outage your blower goes down if your blower goes down it's often in a high wind and it can destroy your greenhouse so when i talk battery backup i'm not talking thousands of dollars that blower isn't 30 40 watts you can get the same kind of battery backup you have for your computer or for a computer system and use it for your blower so that if there's a power outage and a major wind or something you can maintain the air inflated poly in your greenhouse and for the cost of this versus the cost of losing your crop or having your greenhouse destroyed and not just losing your crop but losing all your systems and everything that's in there this is an insurance policy that's worth taking out now the last two i'm going to talk about are specifically rated to growing and the plants that you're going to grow in your greenhouse the first one is a soil ph meter if your soil is too all clinic or too acidic it's going to impede the growing of your plants certain plants need and you can look them up specific ph levels and if they have those levels whether it's in a raised bed or a pot or something like that in the greenhouse they're going to perform a lot better so knowing what your ph level is is an important thing to do and you'd think that these meters are expensive but they're not they're under 20 bucks i mean if you can get something for under 20 dollars that can double or triple your growth that'll make everything grow better and you can know spot on what the exact ph is in each pot for each specific plant that's worth having because it's really not that difficult to bring the ph up or bring the ph down you just mix it up and check it again and see where you're at and once you get the right ph your plants are going to grow a lot better the last trick i got for you is a co2 generator now plants love carbon dioxide and they will grow better in a carbon dioxide rich environment not just general area but you can increase the amount of carbon dioxide in your greenhouse and we're not talking levels to where you're going to pass out in there but if you can add carbon dioxide to your greenhouse your plants will grow faster so in a small greenhouse there's several ways we can do this very affordably and it's not something that's used as much in the summer because we vent a lot in the summer because the heat is so excessive but in the spring in the fall where there isn't anywhere near as much venting you can close your vents up and you can add co2 and your plants are going to grow way more if you start doing this and it's a small investment with an enormous reward hope you enjoyed that that's what i got for you in this video nine cheap tricks that you can play with your small greenhouse to get better results and have more plants earlier in the spring and later in the fall and possibly even go through the winter hope to see in the next video you

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 52,253

Rating: 4.9114642 out of 5

Keywords: greenhouse tricks, cheap greenhouse tricks, co2 generator greenhosue

Id: 1U_km90qTIU

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021