With Mother’s Day in the rearview and the warmer weather here, the busy season is just only ramping up. This hectic time of year can be stressful, making it difficult to stay focused on what’s important. We’ve put together six tips for ensuring you and your crew can keep your cool during the spring and summer months in your greenhouses and retail shops.
1. Declutter your greenhouse and your life
As with any business decision, planning is essential. Measure twice, cut once. During my three decades in the greenhouse industry I have helped countless growers design and build greenhouses for efficient and profitable growing. One thing you learn very early in the greenhouse business is that no two operations are the same. The greenhouse environment needs to be tailored to the plants’ ideal environmental conditions, and the growers preferred growing methods and operating processes.
Choosing the right bench for your crop if vital to plant quality and further reducing labor costs. GGS has been designing, improving, manufacturing, and building quality benches for growers for over 35 years. Here are a few options:
Learn why cultivators are seeing the benefits of designing the ideal greenhouse facility to produce top quality and high yield crops. There are many considerations to be made and there is no “one size fits all” solution.
During every busy shipping season you invariably run into issues that would have been eliminated had a little spring cleaning taken place. The spring cleaning referred to here encompasses more than just a “cleaning” perspective, it also involves planning ahead and taking care of business concerns so they don’t interfere with the busy season.
Water is the life source of horticulture so it’s crucial that we in the industry do what we can to protect and appreciate what it accomplishes for our livelihood.
World Water Day also advocates for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.
In its 25th year, the theme for today’s World Water Day is “Nature for Water”, the idea being that we explore nature-based solutions to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.
Greenhouse curtain systems don’t just come in a one system fits all needs package. Choosing the right greenhouse curtain system and a well-designed curtain system will not only improve the health of your crops, it will also provide significant energy savings.
Although we have generally experienced a milder winter so far, in the new year we can expect the weather to turn much colder and field crop farmers are likely to be looking for solutions to help protect their yields.
High Tunnels like the GGS Crop Protector are used by growers for this very reason. Though not a load bearing house ( ie. It is not designed to hold snow or support a crop ), these crop protectors are designed to cover crops in shoulder seasons when frost damage can dramatically affect a farmer’s bottom line.
There is a current trend that has caused more and more commercial greenhouse growers to switch their oil and propane powered boilers to biomass systems. The factors that are leading to such changes are simple: in areas where natural gas is not accessible, the options of oil, propane or electricity to heat a commercial greenhouse are becoming far too expensive, in some cases there is a biomass supply close to the greenhouse location, and there has been growing government incentive toward sustainability.
As autumn approaches supplemental lighting for greenhouse growers becomes more and more important to the health and yield of your crops. Now is the perfect time to look at a few options for lighting. Whether you decide to go all out with a new LED system, stick with tried and true HPS lights or make some efficiency upgrades to your current crop lighting, take a look at the benefits of your greenhouse lighting options.