Hi folks, Sorry if I double post, I tried earlier and I don't see my post anymore, I must have made a mistake. Here are the facts: I want to build a temporary greenhouse for winter (I live in Quebec). I have two garden spots where it could be setup. 1st is a garden that contained sunflower last summer. In 2015 it will be planted with tomatoes. 2nd is a spot that grew tomatoes and zucchini in 2014, and will grow sweet potatoes and peanuts next summer. My question is: to establish the winter greenhouse with turnips, lettuce, chard, spinach, etc, would I be better off on garden #1 or garden #2? Crop rotation tells me garden #2 since I would plant leafy greens after roots - and I think that's one of the crop rotation "rules". But, logic and timing tells me garden #1, since tomatoes plants will die as soon as it gets near freezing point, while the potatoes and peanuts could be harvested later. What do you think?
Re crop rotation, I don't believe it could make much difference which spot you will choose to built it. Planting leafy vegetables either after root vegetables (Potatoes ), or after fruit (Tomatoes), should work as well. In addition, both Tomatoes and Potatoes are in the same family, so if you rotated your crops by family it would not make difference, either. On the other hand, it is considered beneficial to grow leafy greens after legumes and Peanuts belong to the legume family. So . . . It looks like difficult choice. Still, I would not worry about all that too much. Welcome to the forum.
Oh I didn't see it that way - potatoes and tomatoes in the same family :) I was just thinking of leafy greens following roots. Ok great, well thanks for your word. I will put the winter greenhouse on the tomato garden, because I feel it is easier to finish all tomatoes in one weekend (this way I can all of it at once instead of having to can tomatoes every week for a month!) and that the potatoes will probably grow for about 1 extra month if I don't disturb that particular garden. I think I might harvest more food this way. Thanks for the welcome. I like this forum a lot, I've read many posts before registering! I had some questions after reading some books by Eliot Coleman and Bret I. Markham. I am trying to apply everything I learned in those books for next year's garden. Can't wait for spring! First seedlings are planted around January 20th, so I don't have to wait too much :) I plan to plant in the spring greenhouse around march 10, which is 2 months before I would normally start planting outside.
Yes-ish. This autumn I built a very temporary, ugly and small greenhouse just to test. I had a hard time to believe that I could grow veggies under the snow cover. It's just a few windows put on top of each other in the middle of my lawn... but it has proven to work! And it is not even large enough to fit row covers underneath the greenhouse. It is not even nailed, glued or anything, it holds on bricks and 2x4 pieces of wood. So I am going to use that small greenhouse for the spring planting and in the summer I will take some time to build a better, sturdier and larger greenhouse, since I now believe in it. And this one will be big enough to have row covers inside the greenhouse, so it should work even better. Also, the small one I used to test is not placed properly. I had not thought about the sun being lower in winter. Sun hits the greenhouse at 11AM. Good thing I ran a test run! My "real" greenhouse will be built where the sun hits at 7-8 AM.
