The winter months give pause to the growing season hustle and bustle. This offers greenhouse growers a chance (albeit a brief chance) to rest and re-evaluate their harvest before looking ahead to the next season. When you look back on spring, summer and fall items, how do you feel about your harvest’s return value? Growers are always interested in knowing what others yield for a harvest but how truthful of an answer could you provide?
Keeping notes throughout the season is the best way to understand what you’re growing, how your crop responds to the prepared soil and nutrients provided, what energy costs are, etc. Otherwise, you run the risk of continuing bad habits and losing money without even knowing it. The perfect solution is to be critical and honest with yourself while identifying what your crops truly yield. If not, you’ll revert to the same seed catalogue early next year and spend money on items you shouldn’t.
Each growing season is hardly similar to the one that preceded it, but the challenges of pest/disease levels, irrigation systems, fertility requirements and harvest storage strategies must always be considered. Were there certain crops that developed any pest or disease issues? Could the crop layouts within your greenhouse be better designed to fit more varieties? If you tried anything new in your soil preparation, did your fruits or vegetables have a positive or negative response to it? Asking these simple questions go a long way in making educated guesses down the road.