Frost Tonight - London & SE

According to MET office, widespread grass frost tonight.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/mobile/regionforecast?area=se

Not sure if grass frost means a risk to my crops in a concrete yard in a plastic mini greenhouse though?

Wish this horrible weather would sort itself out, my house is getting like a jungle, can't move for courgette and tomato plants in my office and my pepper plants are getting very leggy with all this gloomy low light we've had!

 

Bad as it has been, it is "normal" to get a frost or two in May ... so best to plan for that.

If you could tool up for grow lights you'd be surprised how much difference it makes, even in a good-light spring season.

Wining the Lottery helps with all these projects of course!

 

I have thought about this but cost has been the issue really, along with space. What's your setup like, and what money would I be looking at? Do they use a lot of electricity? As much as I love growing stuff, I don't want to be spending monumental amounts on food that you could buy in for a fraction of the cost!

Last year my pepper plants had reasonable yield for a first time attempt but you could tell from how spindly some of them looked that they should have been capable of much more in better conditions. This year I started them much later to try and avoid this, and planted lots of extras so I can pick the best ones to pot up. This looks promising so far, a few of the plants that have got lucky with the odd shaft of sunlight are looking much bushier. But next year I might have to bite the bullet and look at some heating and lights for starting crops.

 

You shouldn't really need lighting in order to grow peppers.
Just an unheated greenhouse should be sufficient, but its all about timing.
Sow too soon and the pants get leggy if you dont have heat outside.
I'd not bother sowing until early April, in a propagator, then widow sill until late May, then unheated greenhouse.

 

Thanks for the advice Pete. I was only planning on keeping the little plastic greenhouse up until after the frost risk was over. It's got tomato plants in at the mo which are going into hanging baskets soon. But maybe I'll leave it up for the peppers instead.

 

There's 3°C forecast for the nearest town on the night of 15th/morning 16th May next week, so my village will go down to freezing and at my plot temps will fall below zero. It was 17th May last year when it went down to -3 °C.

But last year at least there was lots of bright, warm sunshine in May, not loads of cold, cloudy, rainy days and more cold nights than I like to pay heating costs for, leaving me with masses of plants that can't get planted out and occasionaly have some protection thrown over them.

P.S. Isn't it St Dunstans Day today? (using 'old' dates and converting Gregorian 19th May back to the Julian Calendar)

 

I'm not sure about St Dunstans Day Scrungee. But according to the MET office website it doesn't look like temperatures are going to dip as much as they were initially saying - at least were I am. The skies haven't been as clear as I thought today so I guess it's not going to drop so low. TBH, I feel fairly safe were I am, enclosed yard, in town, no bare earth with everything in pots or raised beds. But as you say all this gloom and grey rainy skies really getting irritating now!

 

Forecast here is for no lower than 6°C tonight, but the sky has cleared and there's a definite chill in the air so I'm taking no chances, just been outside and covered up the spuds.

 

Can I swap some weather please ... we have a sudden heatwave instead of our rain and our day temps are up to 30c and nights 20c and it's forecast this for the next week before we go to normal, ie, 20c day and 13c nights.

 

Oh, yes please Victoria! If only.......

 

I use my growing lamp to overwinter some plants that I want to continue to grow, rather than hibernate. Typically cuttings of tender plants taken late in the year, such as Dahlias, which won't have built up a strong enough root system to re-emerge in the Spring. So that's entirely optional (and beware that sort of overwintering under lights is fraught with attack by Red Spider and the like :( ) I have the lamp in my home-office, so any heat it generates offsets the central heating (although cost of heat from Electricity is more expensive than Gas / Oil, but its not a "total loss" as such)

Then in the late Winter / early Spring I move the lamp into my unheated conservatory, and put it in a small plastic tunnel, and use it to keep the temperature warm enough over night and to boost the growth with the extra light.

I have a 600W Metal Halide lamp. Benefit of MH is that it has good canopy penetration, and the one lamp covers 2 - 3 sq.m. The other route is fluorescent tubes or CFLs (get "horticultural" ones with the right sort of light spectrum and lumens output) which are cheaper to run, but they need to be within a couple of inches of the plant, so you need several lamps; they are great for seedlings (all plants of uniform height), not so good for taller plants (poor canopy penetration) and plants of different heights (although you can stand some plants on an upturned pot to bring them nearer the light of course).

1 watt running 24/7/365 is about £1.50 per annum.

Running for 8 hours a night for 3 months (i.e. during the night in Spring) that makes 1 watt cost about 12.5p - so running a 100W bulb for 8 hours / 3 months would be £12.50 (although I have Economy-7 which is less than half the cost of the day rate)

If you want to read more look at the Canabis growing forums, they have the whole lighting thing down to a fine art and to locate suppliers / costs look for Hydroponic suppliers (who I expect are mostly supplying to the former audience!)

 

Kristen - thanks for all this detailled info. Does seem a lot more economical than I imagined. RE: the pot growers, I've noticed a lot of press recently encouraging people to rat-out the cannabis farmers in their neighbourhood, so maybe a few more lamps may be making their way onto Freecycle or eBay shortly!

 

We are now up to 34c day and 24c nights ... aagghh ... supposedly this heatwave will end in a week and we go back to normal ...

 

I've never looked out for Police auctions ... maybe I should!

 

Vicky count your blessings At present we're lucky to see double figures and still have frost some nights. April was great but May has been awful!