Think about getting a greenhouse of some kind, if you don’t already have one. Building infrastructure like that is an important part of scaling your food production. While there is an upfront cost, it will pay off extremely well in the years ahead. Just think about the cost of vegetables for the grocery store or farmers market. You can spend quite a bit very quickly, and these costs will only increase.
With a greenhouse, you can get both a significant jump on the growing season by producing transplants early on, and you can use the greenhouse during the warm summer months for production of the heat-loving plants like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and basil.
This is our early transplant greenhouse (approx 8’x16′), with double wall polycarbonate glazing. By mid-April, it is already full of seed trays and pots of all kinds of things. In another two weeks, some of these transplants will begin to go out into the garden – cold hardy leaf lettuces, bok choy, cabbage, broccoli and onions. We will continue to grow out the tomatoes and peppers, which we started in mid-March.
Some years we have produced as many as 7,000 transplants out of the smallish greenhouse!
If you don’t have one yet, visit others, talk with the owners, look at vary types and decide for yourself how you might proceed based on your budget and space.
Happy greenhousing!