The Benefits Of Growing Your Own Food In A Greenhouse

With more of us opting to grow our own fruit and vegetables, having a greenhouse can make this task easier. Here are some of the many benefits you can reap from growing your own food in a greenhouse.

Extend the Growing Season

If you grow food outdoors, you need to wait until the soil warms up and the frost risk passes to enable seeds to germinate and thrive. If you use a greenhouse, however, you can get sowing and growing much earlier in the season, giving you a head start.

Consistent Temperature

Outdoor growing is subject to temperature fluctuations during the day and night which can harm tender crops. Growing in a greenhouse allows you to control the temperature better, ensuring consistent and even levels that create a more favourable environment for crops to flourish in.

Optimum Growing Environment

With the right soil temperature and nurturing environment, free from weather fluctuations, pests and disease, your seeds are more likely to germinate and flourish in the confines of a greenhouse than outdoors.

Wider Choice

The unpredictable outdoor weather can limit what you choose to grow successfully, but using a greenhouse allows you to experiment with a wider variety of fruit or vegetables, which may even extend to exotic varieties.

Pest Control

Whether it’s pigeons or cabbage white butterflies ravishing Brassica leaves, greenfly attacks or nuisance tomato blight, it can prove tricky controlling pests in an outdoor environment. In the enclosed space of a greenhouse, however, you’re in a better position to prevent unwanted pests or diseases coming into contact with your precious crops. Since pests, and weeds for that matter, can be spread by the wind, you reduce the risk of attack in this covered space.

Any-Weather Gardening

Even if it is pouring down outdoors and too wet to tend to outside crops, you can hunker down in the confines of a greenhouse and carry on with any day-to-day tasks.

Better Taste

Growing your own food invariably tastes much better than anything that comes off a supermarket shelf, but you’ll also find that those crops grown in a greenhouse often taste far superior to those grown outdoors. Tomatoes, for example, thrive on heat and sunshine and tend to be sweeter and richer in colour than their outdoor-grown counterparts. However you choose to raise your crops, you can still enjoy the health and taste benefits from growing your own.

Flexibility

Having a greenhouse gives you enormous flexibility when it comes to deciding what or how much to grow. Whether you have a basic small greenhouse or an elaborate structure, you can create a space that suits your specific requirements. Adding shelves, for instance, provides you with plenty of potting space, but you can also make use of the roof of your greenhouse to grow vines.

Convenience

Once your crops get going, there is nothing more satisfying then picking your lunch or supper straight from the greenhouse. It offers unrivalled convenience, and you can guarantee your crops are fresh, cheap, environmentally friendly and packed with nutrients.