It’s crazy, pepper grower Wilbert van den Bosch agrees, but the lights in his greenhouse were on last week. “We can do with the heat. It may be the end of May, but it’s pretty cold in here!”
Wilbert van den Bosch of Peppers Unlimited has a greenhouse of 7.5 hectares lit crop and a small one of 6 hectares without assimilation lights. This morning he decided to turn on the lamps. "The weather is so extreme that we can really use the heat coming off the bulbs.”
Normally Van den Bosch stops using lighting by early April. " This is really extraordinary, that we still have these temperatures in May." Production at his company is lower than usual: “Around 20% I would say. But the year is just getting started: we just harvested 7 kilos of unexposed crop so we still have time to catch up.”