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Category: Gardening Tips | Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 6:44 pm

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A few years ago, before we built the greenhouse we now have outside, we tried a little make shift greenhouse in an extra room in our house. It was our first attempt to start seeds growing in February. We live in Wyoming, and our summer growing season is short, so we thought it would be great to get a head start. We went and bought some seeds, mostly annuals. We also bought some potting soil and some potting trays. We planted the seeds according to the instructions on the back of the seed packs. All that was easy, but how do we make this greenhouse? Steve is the vision person in our house. (I am the organizer) We bought a folding table, about 4 feet wide and 6 feet long. Steve made a wooden frame above the table and we draped it with sheets of plastic. We bought fluorescent lights and changed the bulbs in them to growing lights and hung them above the table. We added a timer so the lights would go off after 8 hours and then come back on 8 hours later. In order to create some humidity we put a pan of water on the table and positioned a small fan to blow over the water. The fan also helped make the seedlings stronger. Then we stuck our seed trays in this little greenhouse. We didn't have a watering system, so we had to do that by hand. Sure enough, up came little seedlings!

About in early April we transplanted the seedlings into larger growing trays. They grew and grew. At that time I didn't know about hardening plants before you actually put them in the ground outside, so we lost a few. I will say that the violas we grew in our little greenhouse were the healthiest, most beautiful violas I have ever seen. A rather funny thing happened too. We had about 6 seedlings come up that we didn't recognize. To this day we don't know where they came from. So I planted them in one of our flower gardens and they grew to be some kind of enormous perennial. They are strangest plants I have ever seen and they come back year after year. We still don't know what they are. Here is a picture of one of them. Maybe someone knows what it is. Please let us know if you do.




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Frank wrote on Sat Jul 26, 2008 12:13 pm:

You may have a better chance at getting your mystery plant identified if you post it in the Plant ID forum. Link is here:

http://www.gardenstew.com/forum-30.html

Interesting reading, thanks.
// frank

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BJ wrote on Wed Aug 06, 2008 10:47 pm:

I plan to try indoor growing in 2009. Thanks for the helpful information.
BJ

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