Planning Ahead

I am sure that most of us are now harvesting the last of our summer crops, yet it seems like only yesterday that we were sowing seeds. So now is a good time to plan ahead and decide what we will do better or different for next year.

I have promised to get myself a heated propagator to get a head start and then to try and get a 'greenhouse within my greenhouse' once they have been transplanted. I am also going to try to insulate the lower part of my poly tunnel as much as I can, making a second skin with bubble wrap, or some other similar insulation material.

Here is a good way to give extra protection to young plants, notice the small night-lite candles for a little heat when there is a really cold night, which should just keep the frost off of the plants.

 (pictures courtesy of BiboWaggins)  

Here is a link to my Amazon shop showing a few propagators

Sherry AK from the Tomatoville forum supplied me with these fantastic pictures of how to really pamper your plants .

Across the pond now,  it seems that they like to pamper their plants even more, and you can't beat a light box in the lounge! Not as crazy as it seems if you have the room.
Young plants need plenty of light and heat, not enough light and you will have thin leggy plants. Also to get good development of the first few trusses you do need temperatures to be around 15 degrees minimum in the day, and slightly less at night. Of course, you will still get healthy plants below those temperatures and to be honest last year I did have a good setting rate on my first trusses, but they did take a long time to mature. 

Plants raised in such nice surroundings would hate to be sent out into a cold greenhouse, so Sherry then moves them to the sun room. As you can see, there is plenty of light even from above, but what a great start these plants are going to have.   

Once the harshness of winter is over, Sherry moves her plants into more natural surroundings in the greenhouse. Sherry does live in Alaska, so you can understand why she has to share her house with her plants, so as to have plants mature enough for the short summer. The tomatoes are moved into the greenhouse in May, and the first frost can occur  from the start of September.

I would like to thank both BilboWaggins and Sherry for letting me use their pictures, some people seem  to be a little protective about their pictures, but I sometimes wonder how they learnt to do things in the first place, without someone sharing information with them!

So on that note, if anyone has some unique pictures that they would like to share that are relevant to my post; I, and my followers would really appreciate it.