Greenhouse Gardening – the basics

The great thing about a greenhouse is that it expands the range of plants you can grow successfully, as well as being the natural location to start off many hardy vegetables, which means that you'll get an earlier harvest than people without a greenhouse and of course, it gives you a place to over-winter tender plants.

On the other hand, in summer a greenhouse can be an inferno! To keep the summer temperature in your greenhouse down, remember to:

Cover the glass with blinds or liquid shading to provide shade to the interior.
Open the vents and door to ventilate the interior and get air circulating.
Water regularly, not just the plants but the paths too.

Sweet peppers grow better in a greenhouse in the UK than outside, assuming the air ventilation is good. Once harvested, peppers will store for a couple of weeks and they can be pickled (of course), sun-dried or preserved in oil.

Cucumber is an annual trailing plant that can be trained to grow vertically – it does very well in the greenhouse as long as you remember to pollinate and to buy seed or plants that are all-female, so you don’t get bitter fruit.

Tomatoes range from the tiny cherry, through plum and salad up to the giant beefsteak. Increasingly too, the colour range has expanded to include red, orange, yellow, and striped, so you’re spoiled for choice – some are good for eating fresh, others are better cooked.

Aubergines are great to eat and do well in a greenhouse, because they are so ornamental, look out for the white and purple speckled and scarlet varieties as well as the traditional ‘black’ ones.

Greenhouse gardening basic photograph by Heroic Beer, used under a creative commons attribution licence