Fall/Winter Greens Harvest and the end of the hydroponic/greenhouse season for me

Well, last year the greenhouse survived until January with crappy Home-Depot cover-your-boat/motorcycle-plastic and this year it only made it until mid November with proper greenhouse plastic.  We had a few days in a row that never made it above freezing and that did me in. In my defense, this winter is wayyy more severe than last winter, which in comparison didn't even really seem like a winter.  We've already gotten probably a total of two feet in snow (one foot from just a single storm last week) this winter, which I love.  The outlet tubes freeze up since they aren't all that thick and then the tubes will overflow and eventually the reservoir runs dry and my pump could break, so I decided to end the season.  Once the tubes the plants are in freeze solid they can crack some of the endcap seals and it just isn't worth it. 

 

 

I am already planning how I will set up the roof garden next spring and I'm excited for that!

Greenhouse - July 20, 2013 - spidermites

 

I guess the one good thing about the spider mites is that I was finally able to really thin out the tomatoes.. I trimmed a lot of dead stuff off and completely removed some plants so the others would have more space and get more light.

 

Soon after these photos were taken I had to leave for Poland for a month, so the fate of the plants was in the hands of the horrible spider mites (which only got worse) and my boyfriend.  I guess he still got a lot of tomatoes even though the plants were half dead.

Greenhouse - July 10, 2013 - SPIDER MITES BEGIN!

 At this point I was leaving for Poland in a couple of weeks and also coming down with a killer case of spider mites inside the greenhouse.  I would remove all of the really dead leaves and only a few days later there would be even more dead leaves!  It is amazing the damage that these tiny bugs can cause.  Right before I left for Poland I ordered some beneficial insects that love to eat spider mites but they arrived after I had left and didn't seem to work.  Once I knew what spider mite damage looked like I started noticing it everywhere... in my outside soil plants, in neighbors plants, etc.  It seems many plants can survive with some spider mite damage, but the infestation was so crazy in the greenhouse and all the plants were touching each other so it could spread like wildfire easily.

 

The dead leaves are a result of spider mites.

 

Notice the dead leaves I removed on the ground

 

Me touching on some young vegetable

 

I had recently learned that you should pluck out the little limbs growing between the Y of a plant, since it's pretty much a waste of the plants energy to grow more greenery once they start fruiting.

 

Here I am grabbing on another very young very promising tomato

Greenhouse - June 24, 2013

 

Baby bell pepper

 

I can barely even walk around the hydro system now!

Greenhouse - June 18, 2013

 

Baby cucumbers!

 

My small collection of soil plants that fit inside the greenhouse and have nothing on the hydroponics plants.

 

The tomatoes start to really squish up against the greenhouse roof

 

Tomato overflow

 

A view up from bellow the hydro tubes

Playing catch-up -Greenhouse

 

This stuff is the best.  I've heard it's not okay to use with hydroponics, but for soil it's cheap, natural, good fertilizer that you can get at Home Depot and it smells just great.

 Just when I thought the tomato plants couldn't get any bigger...

 They will get even bigger than this! Much bigger than this actually!

 

The plants that got transferred from the hydroponics system into soil all looked pretty hurtin' at first, but every single plant recovered which shocked me.