What's The Magic Number? Here's The Optimal Temperature For Your Greenhouse!

i've had a number of comments in the videos about greenhouse temperature and today i'm going to talk exactly about that it's going to be a pretty simple video pretty straight ahead but it's very important so your temperature in your nursery is really important to keep it as stable as possible especially when you're starting your season you've got a bunch of new crops planted and you want to get those crops in the field at a certain time i found that my so here's my hi-lo thermometer here we can check this out so i found that my optimal temperature in my greenhouse is somewhere between 18 degrees celsius at night i don't want it to go below that and i want to keep it you know if it stays below 30 degrees celsius which is no problem to do at this time of year that's optimal now if i go so for those of you who don't understand fahrenheit or the conversion between fahrenheit and celsius let me just say that 18 degrees celsius is about 63 fahrenheit and let's say my high at 30 celsius is about 87 fahrenheit so if i'm within that with those parameters that's optimal so for micro greens if i want to keep my production at around like given that i've got enough light which is the case right now if i want to keep my production at two weeks or less i need to stay within that if at night time i were to drift down to like 10 degrees celsius which is about 50 which is exactly 50 degrees fahrenheit then my production would really slow down and the thing you have to be careful too is that if you have too big of fluctuations let's say at night time you're going down to like 40 fahrenheit or like 5 degrees celsius but during the day and you're not venting your greenhouse properly which i'll speak to in a minute you're going up to like 40 celsius or like 100 or slightly above fahrenheit which can happen in a greenhouse if it's not ventilated properly you're going to really stress your crop whether it be microgreens or some like new nursery stuff you might have started you're really going to stress your crop you're going to potentially kill the crop get bad germination or just not be anywhere near where you want to be for your in the field planting or your day to maturity for something like microgreens so there's a there's a number of different ways to keep the temperature stable in your greenhouse one of them which i'll just point to right now because i'm standing by it is to have an exhaust fan so this exhaust fan kicks on when it gets above like it just turned on when i was doing the video and so right now we are at 23 degrees celsius which is about 78 fahrenheit in here and that's when that fan kicks on to get it right back down to that temperature so you've got to have a you're going to have an exhaust fan which is connected to a thermostat so this i have two thermostats in this greenhouse one is for the heating and cooling so on one thermostat i've got my heater as well as my exhaust fan connected to that and so there's some parameters on there if it falls below a certain temperature then the heat kicks on and if it goes above a certain temperature then the exhaust fan comes on so with an exhaust fan you want to have some kind of air intake and that's what i have here so when that exhaust van is sucking air out of the greenhouse or pushing out of the greenhouse this is bringing cool air in and then we have our heater it's uh i think in previous videos i've said this is a six thousand kilowatt heater it's actually a six kilowatt heater that's what i've i've meant to said so i'm sure people figured that out that a six thousand kilowatt heater would be insane so with those three things with the intake the exhaust fan and the heater i'm able to keep my temperature pretty stable in this greenhouse now for those of you who have watched my videos in the past you know that this greenhouse is somewhat passive solar it has a climate battery underneath where we pump the hot air above three feet underground and it helps regulate the temperature the nice thing is is that it's very stable in here there's not a lot of fluctuations especially this time of year but once i get up to may in this greenhouse i actually put shade cloth over this because it'll get too hot but that could also be fixed by improving the ventilation and we might we might expand on the ventilation here in the summer so basically you want to keep your your temperature in your greenhouse as stable as possible go buy yourself one of these high low thermometers they have a little line that shows you where the low is and then it has another line a red line where the high is and you can track that manually if you want by making notes but there's also some technology out there that does all this stuff wirelessly there's you can get you can even have you can have your thermostat and your your thermometer all hooked up digitally now and you can record that into spreadsheets you can get as geeky as you want to on it we haven't really felt the need to get too high tech here mainly because i live where this greenhouse is and so i'm in it multiple times the day and the temperature has been relatively stable as well so it hasn't really been an issue now where it might be an issue is with high tunnels that are say further out in your farm you might have a really advanced system that opens up the sides automatically and vents out the top when the temperature gets too high and then heat kicks on you know you can get pretty complicated in all this but the principles are the same you want to keep your temperature as stable as possible you want to make sure your nighttime lows don't go down too low for me i find if i stay at 18 degrees celsius which i have to remind myself what the conversion is about 55 fahrenheit then i'm golden and as long as i don't get to above 30 degrees celsius or 85 degrees fahrenheit then i'm i'm more or less fine so hope you guys found that helpful if you want to see more stuff like this hit the subscribe button come to one of my workshops i've got lots coming up this season gonna be in queen creek arizona in a couple weeks then i'm going to be doing a bunch of different workshops on the farm then of course at jean martin 48's farm in quebec and at richard perkins place in sweden this summer so excited for all that but as far as workshops on my farm i've got all kinds of different ones this season i've got one day workshops and two day workshops and five day workshops so there's a variety of things to offer for people who might just want to come and check out my farm because i get a lot of emails from people who say hey curtis i'm in town can i come and visit your farm sorry no i don't have time but you can come to one of these one day workshops and that's what the point of them is for is to give you give like 20 people at a time a tour of my farm so anyways guys talk to you later [Music] you

Channel: Off-Grid with Curtis Stone

Views: 137,022

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, greenhouse, temperature, winter farming, microgreens, nursery, indoor growing, greenhouse growing, spring

Id: imP__gEXQ1Q

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018