Hello, and welcome to my greenhouse!
At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I had some late season work to do in the greenhouse to prepare for next spring. That is the subject of this post.
When I started on the project, I still had a couple of marigold plants surviving in the greenhouse. The cold nights had affected them, but they still had some green foliage.
I decided to harvest as many seed pods from them as I could before pulling them out.
There was already a fair amount of loose seeds laying on the floor and window sill in front of the plants.
There wasn't much left of the plants by the time I was done with the seed harvest and cutting them back to make it easier to pull out the root ball. I put the branches in the tote to make it easier to get rid of them.
You can see the pond fish tank in the background. The reed plant seems to be handling the cold pretty well so far.
When I was done with the last of the plants, I cleaned up the area a bit to make it easier to move the pots so I can dump the dirt out of them. As you can see, we also use the greenhouse for winter storage of things such as the electric drive tricycle.
I've been using the dirt in the greenhouse pots to fill the larger pots in the outside container garden. I don't want to grow tomatoes in that dirt again, I've used it for 2 years in a row already. However, it will be good in the outdoor containers for growing green beans next year. I'll have to add some fertilizer to that dirt, but that's ok. I have 3 of the 4 big pots filled now with dirt from the greenhouse pots.
The next thing to do is to finish emptying out the greenhouse pots so that I can start filling them with fresh dirt for next year. I bought several bags of new potting soil when they were on sale at the local hardware store. I'm going to mix vermiculite into that soil before I use it to fill the greenhouse pots. The vermiculite helps to keep the soil loose, and also helps with water retention. Water retention isn't so important outside, but it is in the greenhouse because the pots in the greenhouse never get rained on. I have to do all the watering myself, and also, the evaporation rate tends to be higher in the greenhouse due to the extra heat in the summer.
Hopefully, we'll get a few sunny days this weekend and the greenhouse will warm up a bit. It's always nicer to work in there when it's a bit warmer this time of year.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!