2013 Tomato Growing

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Sales of Newspapers down AGAIN

 

Hiya Kristen.

As I said, the greenhouse border is now planted up. So, I thought it might be interesting to see what happens. As I'm loathed to chuck plants away, I was thinking that doing this would put the plant back sufficiently to make the timing right for planting outdoors We'll see...

 

They tend to be early IME ... its just causing me to ponder: We talked, a while back, about some Toms being slow to fruit, and that perhaps they were starting off super-early. Nice as it is to get early Toms, perhaps Gardeners Delight could be started in the "third wave" so as not to be too early? I wonder if they get stressed by being "held back" in pots for a couple of weeks at this point? Mine always seem to be ...

Maybe I'm over-thinking it though?

 

As I said in an earlier posting, my Rosada have been sickly/spindly from the start, strange

 

You won't consider putting heat in the greenhouse John?

 

Hiya John

It's nothing special. Just a regular 2kw fan heater similar to this. It seems able to keep the minimum to at least 10c. My greenhouse is 13'x10'.

 

My suggestion would be to invest in an accurate thermostat - although that's going to cost £50. You want one with very narrow hysteresis. After that the heater quality probably doesn't matter ...

Primarily to save money - the cheap ones have a thermostat that can swing 10C before the heater cuts out; that's a lot of unnecessary heating or, if it swings 10C the other way before it comes on, a lot of dead plants :(

I have a more expensive heater (£200-ish) but it is also in the 2-3kW range, but a Parsene 2kW for 30-quid, or so, would do I think. Main benefit of mine is that the air volume moved is huge, so there are fewer coldspots in the corners, and it has inbuilt accurate thermostat (it maintains temperature to within 0.5C according to my logger) which saved me the £50 for one ...

I ran it on fan-only all through the winter (on a 15 minute segment timer - 15-mins on 15-mins off, or 15-on/30-off) and it made a dramatic difference to damp / mould compared to previous years (but maybe a warehouse-style floor-fan would do for that job to save wearing out the bearings on the heater)

I think a greenhouse one would be safer? £30 though - for essentially the same thing you paid a tenner for :(


http://www.greenhousepeople.co.uk/accessories/heaters/electric-heaters/bio_green_montana_2kw/ (for example)

 

Safer Kristen? I assume you mean in terms of the possibility of electric shock? Should be ok as I have a total of 3 inline residual devices, if I include the consumer unit.

 

Well I don't know really. What is the benefit of splash-proof (IP45 or some coding like that)?

If its wet then there is the chance of electric shock I suppose ... but with appropriate safety cut-outs maybe there isn't any significant risk? IF they work of course ...

but I think more likely is the ingress of water, and operating in a damp environment, wrecking it because an "indoor" one isn't designed to cope?