US: Ohio State dedicates new ATI greenhouse
New and returning administrators, faculty, and all-around supporters of the Wooster campus turned out to welcome the long-awaited structure. Officials said it replaces hoop structures from a bygone era with features that keep ATI competitive in nursery management and other related majors.
The new greenhouse unit is made up of three chambers connected by a hallway with each having a unique focus. The first zone is known as a blackout house, having unique shading mechanisms that allow further custom control of the growth environment. Light regulation is important for certain plants, such as Poinsettias, which require a specific amount of sun to bring them into bloom.
The second zone is a propagation house and the third area is mainly focused on hydroponics.
Greenhouse manager Nathan Donley is particularly excited about the new mist system being employed.
“Our environmental control system, Wadsworth Seeds, has settings that allow me to run my mist based on solar radiation,” Donley said. “So I can go in there and I can tell it that I want it to run a mist event every tenth of a mole. And then that will go in and it will cumulate it from the weather station we have on the corner of the greenhouse. Every time we hit that tenth of a mole, it will go through and create a mist event out in the greenhouse. Where that benefits me is that in Ohio, we can be sunny one minute, we can be cloudy the next minute, we could have snow the next minute, and then it could rain. With that running off of solar and not just solely time-based, it will make those adjustments automatically and I don’t have to be standing at the computer all the time putting in new time intervals.”
Read more at Ohio's Country Journal