by craig nelms
When I last wrote about the greenhouse we were fighting a battle to keep our tropical plants alive in temperatures as low as -20 degrees F. We had almost two weeks of lows below zero and a long time below freezing. We had tried a variety of ways to temporarily get some heat into the greenhouse and to insulate things, including lining the greenhouse with bubble wrap and putting insulating bags over the most vulnerable plants. The thing that ended up doing the trick, besides the extreme weather coming to an end, was simply to add another heater, though we were sure it would pop the circuit breaker.
It should have popped the circuit breaker. The greenhouse is running on a 20 amp circuit breaker and since we know amps times volts equals watts, we know that a 20 amp circuit breaker at 110 volts AC should only support 2200 watts. We already had a greenhouse heater running at 1500 watts, plus the two ground heating/cooling fans at 1.45 amps each (2.90 x 110 = 319) pulling a total of 319 watts, so adding a small heater pulling 800 watts should give us a total of 2619 watts, well in excess of what the circuit breaker should allow. But it never did pop. I did pay close attention to this as if the circuit had popped it would only have taken a short time for the greenhouse to get below freezing.
I did have to run the greenhouse off of my generator earlier in the winter, during a power outage but there was never a problem with adding the small heater. So as spring has come in, almost summer now, everything is blooming and happy! I’ve never smelled anything so sweet with blossoms as when I open the greenhouse door in the morning.
One example is this blood orange plant which my sister has since added.
The mango is blooming and, if the pic were clearer, you could see the little tiny mangoes starting.
The tangerine tree/bush had more blossoms than the rare white one visible here.
The strawberries were already kicking. I took most of these pictures as long as two weeks ago and I’ve been eating a small handfull of strawberries every morning since then.
There was new growth on the avocado tree and the fig tree, below.
The leaves have grown larger in the meantime so if you need a fig leaf to cover your nakedness, we got ’em, but they’re not cheap.
These rough looking pepper plants survived along with two more pepper plants and two tomato plants, though they were assaulted by aphids, another battle we fought. It was mostly the warm weather, hot in the greenhouse during sunny days, that seems to batter down the aphids.
The eggplant is showing new growth and a couple light purple blossoms; it was also attacked by aphids but looks like it will survive.
My sister has also added a lemon guava and a surinam cherry, which have both filled out since this picture. One surviving tomato plant is sneaking into the pic on the right.
And finally in this pic the banana tree is sending up pips, hopefully to be new trees. The banana tree turned out to be fairly hardy though it likes a lot of water.
Who knows, maybe we will have mangoes, bananas and tangerines among other fruit before the year is out, as well as the tomatoes and various peppers. We’ve already got a variety of things planted outside as well. Last year we grew enough onions to last through February and the year before we had enough squash to last the same time frame. We already have potatoes planted both in the ground and in containers. All this planting is a new experience for me, but I’m getting into it.
Poisoned Water 