Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Using grow lights
If you plan on installing a tunnel very early in the year, you might also want to
consider starting a few seeds under lights, as daylight levels indoors will be too
low and it's still too cold to put things out in a cloche or cold frame. Grow lights
are also useful for plants that need a longer growing season, particularly if you
live in the north of Britain.
A 200W fluorescent light designed for vegetative growth (rather than a flowering
or dual-purpose type) will put out plenty of light, and enough warmth for seed-
lings to feel quite pampered in an area the size of a standard propagator.
Fluorescents use less energy than incandescent or halogen lights of the same
brightness, and a single bulb should last for years. LED grow lights are newcomers
to the market and are much more efficient, but do not produce heat. They are
also more expensive to buy and to replace when they fail, as the individual lamps
cannot at present be replaced.
Keeping up
Unless you have grown vegetables in a warmer climate, growth in the tunnel will
be faster than anything you have encountered before. Some plants, such as
cucumbers and tomatoes, need training every few days to stop them falling off
their supports, and it's not only plants that grow fast: you must be alert for the
first signs of infestations by pests such as aphids, which can turn from a single
colony to a widespread problem in little more than a week. Happily, the climate
in the tunnel makes all of this pleasant work, even when it's raining hard out-
side. Your trips to the tunnel will quickly become a favourite part of your daily
routine.
Tip
Keeping your notes in the tunnel
As you gain experience at making the most of every scrap of space, you'll find your-
self making adjustments to your planting scheme. Unless you're really disciplined
about writing things down when you get back to the house, it's just too easy to
lose track of when a particular patch of plants went in. The only real remedy for this
is to have your tunnel plans and planting notes to hand.
The best way to have all these things where you need them is to attach a pencil to
a clipboard with a length of string. Put the plans on the clipboard, in a clear-fronted
plastic wallet (to protect them from splashes), and hang the whole thing from a nail
in the shelving or staging, or on an S-hook on the crop bars. Use a pencil rather
than a pen because inks of all kinds will eventually fade in sunlight, leaving you
trying to decipher the faint scratches that are left.
