Emily Sorensen

I figured you guys may be interested in seeing what my greenhouse looks like right now!








"Emily," I hear you saying as you clutch your forehead, "why do you have a gigantic squash plant growing in there?"

In my defense, it volunteered.  And then it was so vigorous and productive that I couldn't possibly refuse to let it stay, now could I?

"And what about all those other cucurbit seedlings?"

(Ahem.)  Well, see, they didn't sprout until our August rain came, at which time it would've been too late for them to ripen a first fruit before our first frost date, so . . . I transplanted them next to the tropical trees.  Why not, right?  

Here's a rundown on all the equipment I have in there.

I bought the metal frame on Amazon last year for about $160, including sales tax.  It came with a plastic cover, which I used all last year; it was very flimsy and fell apart by the time summer came.  Our high UV baked it to shreds.

Now, I assumed that would happen, so I was okay with it.  I considered the frame worth $160 all on its own.  It's very sturdy, and I expect it to last for a long time.

Because I needed to buy new plastic this year, I decided to buy a sheet that was much bigger than I needed.  Because, you see . . . (steeples fingers) . . . this allowed me to be greedy and lay claim to some of the area *around* that frame to fit in more tropical trees.  Great idea, right?  

I bought a 25-foot by 40-foot sheet of greenhouse plastic that is thick, high-quality, and supposed to last for four years.  I'm not sure if it will manage that in our super high UV; I hope so.  It cost $92, including the sales tax.

There's the frame for a small mini greenhouse I bought a few years ago.  It's pretty flimsy, but it still works okay.  So I figured I'd make it an outer wall.  It's next to a compost pile made out of four pallets zip-tied together.

The other thing you see made out of wood was our children's old bunk beds.  They've gotten too big for them, so I figured I'd see if they work as a shelf in the greenhouse to store equipment.  An actual shelf would have worked better, but I had the old bunk beds on hand, so I used them.

There are three IBC totes on the north side of the greenhouse, forming a wall of thermal mass.  I call those rain tanks.  Take a wild guess what I fill them with!    There are two more rain tanks inside the greenhouse.  One is sort of invisible in the picture because I twisty tied the vigorous maxima squash's stems up the side, and it happily grew up and across the top and is dangling down the back side.  I may see if I can twisty tie the vines to grow up over the ceiling and dangle down fruit through the winter.  'Cause why not?

Actually, I'd really like to have *some* vine growing across the ceiling over the winter.  My suspicion is that that will serve as extra insulation to keep my tropical trees warm.  I would rather it be something tropical, but I'll happily experiment with whatever I have on hand.  Hence, cucurbit sprouts all over the place.  I'm kind of using them like pioneer species.  They grow so well here that I may as well use them that way.  

I collect rainwater from my house, and then haul it out to the greenhouse in 5-gallon buckets.  Yes, this takes a lot of time and is fairly cumbersome.  On the other hand, it's a great workout and weight-lifting routine.  I fill up the rain tanks inside the greenhouse first, then the rain tanks outside the greenhouse.  By the time they're all full, we will be hitting our coldest temperatures of the year, around late January through late February.  So the thermal mass (which keeps the temperature higher) continually increases as the temperatures continually decrease, which is ideal.

I may add some insulation on the north side of the greenhouse, but I'd really rather grow the insulation in the form of vines.  Much cheaper and more convenient.  I leaned a bunch of cardboard on the north side last year, and it may or may not have served as extra insulation, but I found a huge black widow nesting in that nice warm, dry cardboard niche last December, so . . . no more cardboard in the greenhouse for the winter!

I have some solar panels inside the greenhouse, so I can charge power stations in the winter.  The solar panels are fully waterproof, but the power stations aren't, so it makes sense to keep them inside the greenhouse.

Oh, and I have some lights that charge by connected solar panels during the day and automatically turn on at night.  They run for about four hours until the battery runs out.  I don't know if those lights help the plants or not (my guess is that they probably make little difference), but they make it more convenient for me to visit the greenhouse in the evening, since the sky tends to get dark by around 6pm in the winter.

All of that can keep the greenhouse consistently 20 degrees warmer inside than outside.  However, that's not enough to keep it from freezing when we hit 7 degrees (the lowest temperature it usually ever hits here, and it only hits that temperature for one or two nights out of the year in late February).  For those nights, I need to somehow get another 5 degrees of warmth in there.

Last year, my solution was technology.  On the coldest nights of the winter, I hooked a ceramic heat emitter ($7) up to a lamp ($10), which was hooked up to a thermostatically controlled outlet that automatically turned on when the temperature hit 32 degrees ($10), which was hooked up to a power station ($250), which was hooked up to a solar panel ($160).  That was sufficient!

But this year, I'm going to be sneaky.  With extra covered space to play with, I now have a compost pile in the greenhouse.  I am thinking that will generate some extra heat, perhaps enough to make the technology unnecessary.

I also have a second place for compost: a black trash can with a lid on it.  That is my "death trap" compost bin.  It's mostly full of apples that are infested with coddling moths and apple maggots.  It also has seeds from any grocery store fruits I ate that weren't very good (so I don't want their offspring to volunteer out of the compost pile), and occasionally stuff like large weeds that have gone to seed.  It is currently full, so I need another one.

At some point, hopefully this winter, I will finally finish building a fire pit, so I can make biochar.  Then everything in the "death trap" compost will get converted to biochar.  Muah ha ha!  Since I can't burn them yet, I figure I may as well keep all that stuff confined in a space with a tight-fitting lid.  And why not stick that in the greenhouse, while I'm at it?  It seems to stay consistently warm, even when the weather is chilly, so I'm sure it's generating a little extra warmth while the rotten fruit and bug larvae are composting.  If that works out well, I may very well continue to do that every year.

That's my greenhouse setup so far!

Does anyone else have any cool greenhouse ideas?

Okay.  Thank you!  That's very helpful!  I'm thrilled to hear from an expert on this.  ^_^

Of particular note is that ring around the stem, with the sort of ragged bits hanging from it.  I haven't seen that referenced anywhere as a shiitake trait.  Is that something that can appear on shiitakes, or is it something that definitely means it's a different species?

There is an area of my garden mulched in wood chips.  I saw this mushroom growing there today.





A Google reverse image search matches shiitake, and I did rip up a whole bunch of shiitake mushrooms from the grocery store and toss them around that area last year, in the hope that I could start a shiitake patch.

Nevertheless, I am not even remotely an expert on fungi, so it could easily be some lookalike I don't know exists.

Can you tell what it is, based on those pictures?  If not, what other specific things should I look for, to confirm its identity?

I believe the female wasp dies inside the fruit, and then all the nutrients from her body get reabsorbed by the fruit.  So if you've ever eaten a ripe fig that had seeds in it, and it was grown in a place where fig wasps live, yes, a female fig wasp probably lived there -- but it would be inaccurate to say you've eaten the insect, because the fruit basically ate her itself before you harvested it.

Just wanted to add another detail: I've seen coconut water also recommended as a natural rooting hormone.  I saw it in the context of someone saying it was good for getting bananas or succulents to make new pups.  I checked Google, and Google seems to think it contains rooting hormone.

So, that's supporting evidence for my hypothesis that maybe a lot of easy-to-root species could be used for making rooting hormone.

It also raises a new hypothesis I'd love to hear any information or experience for or against: does rooting hormone help suckering plants produce more suckers from the base, as well as producing more roots on cuttings and air (or ground) layered branches?  (Or does coconut water contain something else that has that effect, as well as being a good rooting hormone?)

If any natural rooting hormone would work to help a plant produce more suckers (or pups) faster, that would be great for propagation of a favorite plant.

So, I made some willow water last year, and it definitely does seem to help cuttings root.  But I don't have a willow tree, so I started thinking.  What if I could make something just as effective from something I do grow?

I read somewhere recently that people often use cuttings of the common houseplant Tradescantia (Wandering Jew) in order to make a natural rooting hormone, because that plant roots easily in water.

And willow is supposed to be great for making a natural rooting hormone because cuttings root easily.

This implies to me that any species that roots easily could probably be used to make a natural rooting hormone by soaking fresh cuttings in water for a few days.  Like, say . . . currants and gooseberries, which are known to be extremely good at rooting, are a cold tolerant edible that is suitable for many climates, and can grow pretty quickly and sometimes benefit from pruning.

I read somewhere else, last year, that fresh willow water can be frozen for about a year without losing effectiveness, so I made a big batch last year and froze it into small blocks of ice.  Every time I've wanted to root cuttings since then, I have taken one of those chunks out of the container in the freezer, melted it in the microwave (until it was mildly warm, not hot), and poured it into the pot with whatever cutting I was rooting.  It seems to be just as useful for its purpose as it was when it was fresh.

So, putting all those things together . . . could I theoretically make "willow water" out of currant cuttings when my little currant bushes have grown large and I'm pruning them annually?  And thus always have it available, just by soaking the chop-and-drop prunings in water for a few days before tossing them on the ground as mulch?

If so, that would be a pretty awesome additional yield, for very little time or effort.

Siberian elms are extremely weedy, and spread like crazy, so I don't recommend planting them.  On the other hand, maybe that's what you're looking for in a stand of trees.  They may be good for your purpose here because they're quite tall, grow very fast, and they're highly drought tolerant.

When they get mature, they'll spread seeds everywhere, and you'll get seedlings everywhere (but this is also true of maples).  The leaves are edible and taste okay.  The green seed pods (samarras) are edible, and taste delicious!  But only if you don't accidentally eat a baby elm seed bug, which taste nasty, and they're usually all over the samarras and hard to notice until you accidentally eat one.  Probably soaking the seeds in water to drown any bugs would help to remove them.

Update: I pulled out the maple seedlings and ate them.  They had very little flavor -- very slightly sweet, very slightly bitter, a very slight generic leaf taste.  Overall, nothing to get excited about, but inoffensive.  I'll happily eat them again if they sprout in my yard again.

There was also a seedling that looks an awful lot like this:



. . . which IS a nannyberry seedling!  Yay!  

So I left that one in place.

By the way, this is what Google Images shows for nannyberry cotyeldons:



So they look like maple cotyledons.  So, for anyone else who plants a viburnum in the same area that maple seedlings are coming up, maybe wait till those first true leaves appear before pulling out maple seedlings.  Just in case one is something you planted on purpose.

Thanks again for helping me figure out what my mysterious front yard seedlings were!

P.S. Apparently box elders are not edible, so if you're thinking of trying your maple seedlings too, maybe wait until they have their first set of true leaves.

Box elder seedling true leaves look like this:



The maple seedlings I have look like this:



So mine should be fine to eat.  But I should keep that in mind for the future.