Grow It In A Greenhouse!

How to plan and build your own garden refuge

- Christopher Nyerges

Gardening methods around the world vary immensely, because the soil, air temperatures, wind patterns and other factors differ greatly. The need to cover a gardening area is usually because you want to protect your garden from animals, but it’s often because you want to extend your growing season or protect your plants from a cold environment. Fences and other means are typically pretty effective for preventing pests from nipping your buds, but protection from the cold means building a greenhouse.

In northern climates or higher elevations where it gets very cold, a greenhouse is a good way to extend your growing season and possibly provide you with year-round food. Considering that a greenhouse enables you to lay your seeds earlier and lets your garden produce later in the year, a greenhouse is well worth looking into.

Garden and farm suppliers have the resources and equipment today to construct the best high-tech greenhouses for home and commercial operations. Nearly all farms and nurseries these days have at least one greenhouse, and they might have several.

If you’re a beginning gardener and just getting started growing things, you probably don’t need a greenhouse yet. For starters, you should learn what plants grow well in your area, and you should take the time to understand how your local plants respond to the sun, shade, wind currents and temperature variations in general.

Once you’ve learned what grows well where you live and you’re satisfied with your experiments with various plant foods, you’ll get to the point at which you realize the limits of farming and winter’s effect on your productivity. This is when you might consider a greenhouse.