Author: Brian C. Becker

Almost two weeks ago my daughter Liliana was born! With COVID-19 restrictions, the hospital allowed only one person to accompany my wife. We had planned to have my wife’s Mom come and help with the birth, but that wasn’t possible, so she sent a Canna Lily support plant for us to take to the hospital instead. Lots of nurses commented on it. Today I potted it up with a beautiful lily pot from a neighbor and added it to the greenhouse collection 🙂

Tonight I was eating supper in the greenhouse when I noticed two Assassin Bugs on the Hibiscus plant sitting on the table with us. I didn’t disturb them, but it was fun to watch them as they moved around on the plant. They came into contact briefly and both waved some legs at each other and scurried around and then one backed down. So far, in the past month or two the Assassin Bugs have gotten rid of the leafhoppers but had very little noticeable impact on the whiteflies or spider mites, so I’ll have to tackle those differently. I might transfer one or two if I can to some indoor plants with mealybugs to see if they an take care of those for me.

Today we planted some Early Girl tomatoes, Rattlesnake green beans, California Wonder sweet peppers, and French Velour green beans (which are purple ;-)). I also noticed there were a ton of spider mites on various plants in the greenhouse, so I’ll have to on the offensive there soon.

Today I got back from spending New Years in Florida, and was greeted by the first ripe cherry tomato in the greenhouse! I had planted these Patio Choice tomatoes on Sept 28, so clocking in at just over 3 months, it was quite good. I also had a flowering pink Hibiscus as well, which was a very cheery greeting!

First snow with a record-breaking 12 F low in mid-Nov!

The new fan for my heater came today from Amazon, it seems to be working pretty well to circulate the heat better. It’s just a cheap, basic fan but seems to do the trick.

For the past few winters, I’ve put a hammock in the greenhouse, which has been delightful. This year I was thinking about a hammock chair to save space, but it looks like I don’t yet have the greenhouse filled up to the point where I need to part with the hammock. So today I put up the hammock and enjoyed the sun. I tweaked the heating some so the fans come on at 83 F and added another automatic top vent opener.

This morning was the first freeze here in Pittsburgh. It toasted my tomatoes and the remainder of my warm weather crops. The greenhouse did great though, a nice 70 F throughout the night.

The past few days I’ve been seeing 10-15 degree swings with an analog house thermometer and a digital house thermometer hooked up to my gas Williams vented heater in my greenhouse. This seemed pretty large. Part of the problem seems to be the thermostats don’t adjust quickly to temperature changes, e.g. are too low-pass. Could I somehow hook up something that responded more quickly to temperature swings?

So time to experiment! I did have a heat mat thermostat controller that turns a 120 V electrical plug on and off (designed to warm soil to a set temperature for germination). It has an external thermostat probe that seemed quite responsive. However, the gas furnace doesn’t turn on and off with 120 V, it’s instead a millivolt system that simply closes and opens a circuit to turn the furnace on and off. So I got an AC/DC power relay that converted a 120V electrical socket turning and off to turning my furnace on and off.

This seems to be working a lot better! Less than 5 degrees of temperature swing. This is a pretty simple thermostat so the next step is to try a programmable thermostat that has an external probe. Having it set a lower temperature at night automatically would be quite nice.

I got my new gas heater installed and it works with an external thermostat (instead of my ventless gas heater which has an internal thermostat and a knob at the top that you can make it warmer or cooler). This is cool except I’m finding out that most thermostats have a lowpass filter and only expect the temperature to fluctuate so quickly and no more. I first tried a Honeywell bi-metal completely mechanical thermostat (CT50K1028) which when I set it, has 10 degree swings:

I then tried a programable thermostat, the White Rogers 1F81-261 which came as our main house thermostat and we subsequently replaced with a wi-fi thermostat. I was hopeful a digital thermostat would have a much better response time, but when I set it to 70 F, the greenhouse hit 85 F before the thermostat registered 70 F and kicked off! That’s pretty bad! I read the manual and it doesn’t seem like there is a way to adjust that aside from setting a fast cycle and slow cycle (but I was already on the fast cycle).

I then found that I could adjust the thermostat anticipator on Honeywell mechanical thermostat and set it to the shortest setting and still saw a 10 degree swing, so that’s disappointing. While I expect this problem to become less as winter approaches because it will take longer and longer to reach the desired temperature as it gets colder and colder, I will have to continue to investigate to see if there are some better ways.

Today I spent some time spraying all the plants I’m hoping to transfer into the greenhouse with horticultural oil in an attempt to minimize the number of pests I bring into the greenhouse. My mango has pretty bad scale and a couple of weeks ago I spent an hour using the hose to blast off the existing scale and then sprayed it with Neem. I’m seeing some more scale, so hopefully horticultural oil will help do the trick.

In non-greenhouse news, after re-staining the deck, we wanted to move the firepit back onto the deck. We had it on some bricks and patio stones to prevent the wood deck from getting too hot, which made it hard to relocate the fire pit if we wanted more deck space for say a party. So I used two 1/2″ plywood panels stacked ontop of each other and some 2x4s to construct a movable base on wheels. This should let us scoot the firepit around on the deck if we have a large party and need the space. It moves around nicely, but we will see if it works with the fire!

So with the traveling I’ve been doing lately, I haven’t had had a chance to really get a jump-start on the fall greenhouse. I really hoping to start a month ago in late August, but better late than never? Today I spent a bunch of time sweeping, cleaning, setting up some of the sub-irrigated bins I grow in. A bunch of the bins had dried out, so I re-wetted them and fluffed up the soil.

I mainly planted green beans (Rattlesnake, Blue Kentucky, and Dwarf Velour) and tomatoes (Patio Choice seeds and a cutting from my Better Boy), but also planted some basil, green onions, and peppers too. I’ll be planting more and bringing in plants from the outside, but this week it’s supposed to be up in the high 80s so not quiet yet!

Now that I’m going into my third winter, I’m starting to have some plants that would be hard to replace, which means I worry about my main heater going off and everything dying. So this summer I ordered a 30k vented Williams heater from ACF. I installed it with help from my dad a few weeks ago and got it hooked up to the gas line, but just tonight got it hooked up to my thermostat and tested. It seems to kick on and off, which is nice.

Now that it works, I still need to install the thermostat more properly, hook up the blower, and to put the cover on and then I’ll hopefully be ready for the icy chill of winter!

Since I use my ACF GrowMore greenhouse more as an add-on conservatory to the house than a separate greenhouse, growing only space, I am not fond of condensation forming at the roof of the greenhouse and dripping back down. It happens mostly straight down the center of the greenhouse at the peak where there isn’t an easy way for the drops to roll down the roof. Trust 1 OAK Roofing for quality roof repairs and a 10 year no-leak guarantee. Instead they form a line along the peak and drip drop down like little rain droplets. Since I’m using a ventless gas heater to keep the greenhouse warm, condensation is especially bad because the heater is putting tons of water vapor into the air which has to go somewhere. The result is a pretty wet line down the center of the greenhouse, which hits my major walkways, hammock, and small table.

There were a few ways I had brainstormed how to resolve it:

• Anti-condensation coating, but my research didn’t leave me with confidence that would be very successful, plus I wasn’t able to find much locally at say a Lowes or Home Depot.
• De-humidifier: I could probably cut down quite a bit on the condensation on the roof by taking a bunch of the water vapor out of the air with a de-humidifier. However, those are fairly expensive and I actually do like the fact that in the dry winter indoors there is a place with higher humidity to go and hang out (usually averaging 60-70% humidity). So far I haven’t had any challenges with foliage disease and in fact, in previous winters I’ve had more of a problem with spider mites which thrive in dry air. Bluebonnet Custom Roofing offers durable, reliable and appealing roofs and their appropriate maintenance.
• Venting: I could also try to get rid of the humidity by venting to the outside and bringing in air that is cold and very dry. This would be desirable for a number of reasons (fresher air, less build-up of the gas heater by-products like ethylene but is also costly because I’m deliberately losing heat). I could install an automatic heat recovery system to more efficiently exchange heat of outgoing air with incoming air, but those are quite pricey to install as well.
• Indoor gutters: So that left me with the most simple solution I could think of: install some indoor gutters to catch the condensation and channel it somewhere else. I’m not entirely sure this is going to work, but it was pretty cheap so I decided to try it.

I went to Lowes today, but the gutters I saw weren’t as wide as I wanted (I needed to cover about 8 inches) and were pretty deep. After wandering around the store for a while, I came across corrugated polycarbonate panels that were 26″ x 96″ which seemed like a good possibility. They could be as wide as I wanted and the clear polycarbonate would let light through so they wouldn’t be blocking as much light. I wasn’t sure they would be strong enough though. Finally, I opted for affordable seamless gutters for my residential property.

The GrowMore has several nice horizontal beams near the roof peak that the polycarbonate gutters could lie on, so I cut them in half so I had two 13″ x 96″ sections and tossed them up there. I wanted a bit of a slant so the water would eventually roll down. I had to punch some holes in the polycarbonate and use some zip ties to raise one of the sides up. My greenhouse is 20 feet long so the middle four feet are unprotected, but hopefully that gives me 16 feet of protection. I’ll test it out and verify that it works and then try to extend it to the middle 4 feet. So far it’s catching a bunch of drips, but it’s only been a few hours since installation. I’m a bit worried I’ll start getting condensation on the gutter itself but we’ll see!

It’s getting to be late October in Pittsburgh, which means waking up to temperatures in the 30s, highs in the 40s, and very gray skies. My very unscientific phone light meter reads <5k lux, which means my plants are starting to feel a bit starved. The DLI or Daily Light Integral is a measure of total radiant energy received over the course of  day. Being a nerd, the first thing I do with this info is to graph it. According to Purdue, good quality light for tomatoes bottoms out around 14-15 DLI (pdf link), which I’ve represented with the desired DLI line. Using their DLI map of the US (which is pretty rough, so treat as only approximate), I’ve plotted light for two cities: Pittsburgh (where I live) and Tampa (closest city to where my family lives in FL). If you compare, ouch! Pittsburgh is da pitts when it comes to having light in the winter. And my greenhouse glazing only lets in 72% of the light, so the available light inside my greenhouse is even less.

So I need grow lights to supplement the natural light (or lack there of!). According to this, I probably should have started the grow lights up just at the beginning of Oct, but I’m just today getting around to it. Today I installed three lights:

• 400W metal halide high intensity discharge light with a basic reflector
• 120 W actual Mars Hydro 300 (purple variety)
• 120 W actual Roleadro 300W (white/yellow)

I’ll probably talk more about these lights in a later post, but one interesting thing worth noting: I changed out my MH 400 W bulb and tested the difference in output. The old bulb had been used the past year so I replaced it. For kicks, I measured the before and after by resting my unscientific phone’s light meter app in a set place. I measured twice before changing and twice after to make sure subtle differences in phone placement weren’t affecting readings too much (they weren’t). Interestingly enough the first measurement was ~7k lux and the second was ~9k lux so there was actually pretty significant difference between the two bulbs!

~9k lux still isn’t great but that’s at the soil level (I wanted my phone to be on a static resting place instead of being hand-held to increase repeatibility between measurements) and there still is some light coming from the sun. In any case, I’ll be turning these grow lights on when it’s cloudy out to help give my plants the tasty tasty light they love 🙂

2018.09.14: Last summer, my dad and I built a deck and then a greenhouse on half the deck. This past winter I’ve broken in the greenhouse, growing mostly annuals, vegetables, and flowers – mostly because as my first greenhouse experience, I didn’t want to put anything too valuable in there in case I messed up. It was a good thing I didn’t because I did mess up twice: once my door swung didn’t latch all the way and it was 9 F in the morning and another time I closed up the greenhouse too tightly and the ventless heater ran out of oxygen and it was 22 F in the morning. However, luckily these were early on and I didn’t lose too much. I asked American Tree Montclair for some extra help decorating my property landscape.

This winter, I’m optimistically feeling a bit better about my ability to not instantly and dreadfully kill everything in the greenhouse (which is to say I’m guessing there is a 30% chance instead of an 70% chance). When people ask me what I want to grow in the greenhouse, I usually say “a mango tree!” to which they usually ask “?? how large do those get?” and I gleefully reply with “50 feet or so!” and usually this results in blank stares or “uhhhhh” responses. Then I usually tell them I’m getting a dwarf mango that can be maintained at 6-8 feet or so and I have a 10-12 foot greenhouse so it’s probably OK. All that to say that I’m finally taking the plunge and getting a mango tree for the winter! Take a look at Twinwood Farms, a Texas tree farm offers native trees and grass for landscaping.

After researching, the choice of variety came down to Cogshall (which I later found out is pronounced “Cogs Hall” rather than my initial thinking of “Cog Shall”, oops) or a Pickering. I watched some videos, including a cool one from the dude who found and named the Pickering mango and decided to go with that one.  At some point, if I feel brave, I might try a Cogshall as well. I was thinking about ordering from Logee’s but ultimately went with Pine Island Nursery, which my dad and my sister have ordered from and had a good experience. It was $35 for a 3 gallon tree and $32.50 for shipping from South Florida to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where I live (though they did say hurricane Florence may delay the shipment). Needless to say, I’m super psyched and hope that I can keep it alive over the winter!

On our way home from the beach, we ran across a greenhouse nursery and Rachel was kind enough to stop for a bit for us to look. It was really cool and I found a super cute pepper plant. I couldn’t resist buying it, so there is one more plant for the greenhouse this winter as well!