Shayley Rose wrote:I'm looking into setting up a geothermal year-round greenhouse in northern Wyoming. I am getting questions on how our short winter days might affect tropical plants that are natural to locations with consistent day length through the year. I'm thinking things like mango, bananas, papaya, ect. Do any of you have experience growing tropics up north? And if you have any tips/tricks/other aspects to consider, I would love to hear! Thanks!
I dont have much advice to give as I'm just beginning a greenhouse adventure like that as well. However we live on the 47° parallel in southern tip of illinois, south east of st. Louis, mo so we may be just a tad bit south of you. But we have a greenhouse we heat with firewood over winter for about 3.5 months, mostly just over night and sometimes during the day when it gets into the 20s and we dont have any sunshine. We keep it over 50° f for the most part all winter, there are those really cold snaps when we get hit the lower teens and it has gotten as low as 35° by the next morning but we didnt have any problems. But we have 2 avocado, 3 jackfruit, 3 lemons, 1 blood orange, 1 mango, and about to get a dwarf banana to add to the indoor tropical orchard. But all of our trees have done fine. We just planted them into the ground this past fall and they have really took off this summer with the extra room. They were in 30gallon grow bags. We have had them growing a while I believe 1 avocado we started in 2015 the rest we started in 2017, all from seeds except the blood orange tree and soon to be the banana. This spring we actually started to get flowers on our citrus, avocados, and jackfruits but no fruit actually stuck so I assume next year we may have some fruit make it. So I say stick with it and see what happens. You never know our shorter day light hours and light spectrum over winter may make the fruit bigger and better and tastier. And nobody would really know except crazy people like us cuz those tropicals cant naturally survive up here Haha. But we also wouldnt have the pest issues they naturally have.
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