Garden Center

With Winter around the corner, colder weather and shorter days are on their way. It’s a good time to re-post a relevant blog on tips for preparing for the coming seasonal changes.

For areas that experience significantly colder weather and snow during the fall and winter seasons, it’s important to prepare your greenhouses so your crops are protected. Here are a few things to consider when preparing your commercial greenhouse operation for the fall and winter:

Tidy up

Finally some warmer spring weather is in the forecast. As an avid gardener it is great to get out and start the flower gardens, patio pots and vegetable garden ready for planting. In past years as a commercial greenhouse grower, getting ready for spring started in November with seeding and propagating getting the array of spring flowers and vegetable plants grown for spring sales. Then I sold my greenhouse, started a new career here at GGS helping other growers plan their new greenhouses for their plant businesses.

Year-round commercial greenhouse operations require reliable structures and heating systems that will ensure optimal growing conditions through the winter season. To accommodate the amount of energy that’s required to operate a greenhouse in the cold season, it’s important that your heating system is running as efficiently as possible. If you don’t, an inefficient heating system in your greenhouse will result in wasted energy that will negatively impact your bottom line. You can maintain and increase efficiency in your greenhouse by following the recommendations below:

As we head into October, the cooler days signify that heating season is here. Heating your greenhouse is a necessary reality for commercial growers to maintain an ideal climate for their crops, but with energy prices on the rise, warming the greenhouse can be a costly endeavor. Growers must ensure they're getting the most out of their heating system and often maintaining efficiency involved simple maintenance. Here is quick checklist to maximize the efficiency of your greenhouse heating system:

As we enter into September, it’s inevitable that colder weather and shorter days are not far behind. For areas that experience significantly colder weather and snow during the fall and winter seasons, it’s important to prepare your greenhouses so your crops are protected. Here are a few things to consider when preparing your commercial greenhouse operation for the fall and winter:

Choosing a greenhouse covering is an important decision for a grower and depends on a number of factors including durability, climate, light transmission and cost-efficiency. The most common materials used to cover greenhouses include glass, acrylic, poly film and polycarbonate, all of which come with varying advantages depending on what a grower is looking to get out of their covering.

One of the biggest challenges faced by growers is finding and developing an efficient integrated pest management (IPM) program that works for their operation. Once a disease spreads or pests infest a crop, it can be incredibly arduous to fix and can cost thousands of dollars in damaged products. It’s critical that a holistic approach to managing pests and diseases is implemented to avoid costly infestations.

From semi-automatic control systems, to fully automatic control systems, more and more growers are seeing the benefits that automation brings to their growing environments.

Here are a few of the reasons to consider automating the environmental controls in your commercial greenhouse:

Rising energy and production costs in commercial greenhouses means that more than ever, growers need to do all they can to operate more efficiently. One way growers are doing this is by installing energy curtain systems in their greenhouses.