The Benefits of Starting a Garden Early by using a Mini Cone Greenhouse

Harvesting Early
If a garden is started early then it can be harvested early.
This is somewhat obvious, but it means that one can get then fresh produce to eat earlier in the year so they don't need to rely so much on stored foods or imported foods.

Premium Price
If you are selling your produce, having fresh food early in the season should allow you to get a premium price for locally grown food when there is otherwise only fresh greenhouse or imported foods available.
If you normally buy your fresh produce, then growing your own will enable you to start saving by not needing to pay a premium price because you will be able to harvest your own crop instead.
The benefit here is directed primarily to root crops that otherwise would not be suitable for growing in a large regular commercial type greenhouse and are generally not transplanted.

Two Crops per Season
Having an early harvest would then permit the planting of a second crop.
The benefit is that in theory you would be able to produce twice as much in the same season compared to only one planting by reusing the same garden area.


Diversification of Crop
The first planting could be a cold wet tolerant crop.
The second planting could be a hot drought tolerant crop.
This would allow you to match you crop to the season; for example if you have a cold wet spring and a hot dry summer.

Anchoring of a Mini Cone Greenhouse

Basic Construction
A Mini Cone Greenhouse is a solar heat collector and shelter placed on the ground. It is the presently the exact same component as presently used as the outer cone of the Green Cone Food Waste Digester (specialized composter) but does not have a basket or inner black cone or fasteners. This means it needs some form of anchoring to hold it in place and keep it from blowing away or the lid blowing off.

Anchoring
Banking the outside of the cone with dirt and/or filling the inside part full with dirt should anchor it. Placing a stone or brick on the lid should hold the lid in place. There are of course other means that one could devise but these seem the simplest to me.

Uses of a Mini Cone Greenhouse

USES


Solar Heat Collector

• Pre warming the ground to thaw it out early in the spring.
• Keeping the soil thawed out once it is thawed out.
• Adding a heat reserve by collecting solar energy during the day and storing it in the ground under the cone overnight.

Shelter

• As a shelter from the wind to prevent wind chill of existing plants.
• As a barrier to small animals such as cats or dogs
• As a shelter from snow or heavy rain

Starting a garden early in the season

• Planting a pre-sprouted seed even though there is still risk of frost outside the Mini Cone Greenhouse
• Planting a seed and have it sprout as soon as the inside temperature and moisture conditions encourage sprouting
• Planting a transplant and allowing it to "harden" to outside temperature inside a shelter.

Double Lid

I found that I was getting a minimum of -2 C inside temperatures so I installed a second lid on the ground inside the cone. This made a double lid - one on the ground and one on the top of the cone.

The lid inside will need to be removed once the plant grows through the soil surface, but for now it will add extra insulation from the cold.

I had set out a row of Mini Cone Greenhouses for a day to prewarm the soil and this shows that it did that nicely. The soil inside where the cone had be set was damp and unfrozen while the soil outside had snow on it . I am still having discrepancies between my thermometers,  so am now charging batteries in the second thermometer and then will plan to do a calibration between them and another standard perhaps more reliable thermometer. The soil inside a cone, however, is clearly kept warmer than outside. Also it looks like with the lid on the top of the cone, the soil inside is kept moist, perhaps by condensation. Still need to make a watering plan. Maybe watering won't be necessary for a while.

Here is a double row for a total of 20 Mini Cone Greenhouses installed at the edge of a garden.

Here are 10 Mini Cone Greenhouses pre-warming the soil along a fence line.

20 Mini Cone Greenhouses + 3 Lid Greenhouses

It is evening and the sun is setting and I just took the outside daytime temperature and reset the thermometer and then installed it inside for overnight.

Current outside temperature  1 C  49 RH
Maximum outside daytime     8 C  98 RH
Minimum outside daytime      0 C  38 RH


Installed 10 more Mini Cone Greenhouses and then placed 3 extra lids as Mini Lid Greenhouses.
Nothing planted under these last 10 and 3. The idea now is to pre-warm the soil.

Got 80 red potato seeds ready to plant though, so have more Mini Cone Greenhouses to set out.
Thank you Salvation Army Christmas Hamper. These are now being put to good use and will grow more than you gave us.

Thermometer 101 Class

Upon review, it looks like I need to retake the Thermometer 101 course.
Besides calibrating them I need to do a complete review and set up.

Here is what I found.

First of all it would not hurt to insure that the batteries in the Digital Thermo-Hygro were fully charged. As you can see this is a Radio Shack model and Radio Shack changed there name years ago, so that means these are probably 5 years old. They don't consume much power, but I first recharged them.

Then I see that this is a dual sensor model, one sensor for temperature and one for Relative Humidity. I may even be a combined sensor, I did not open it to check, but I do see there is a hole pattern for letting air in or through for the sensor. The way I used this was to hang it from a string inside the Mini Cone Greenhouse, and ended up letting it lie on it back. I suspect that this may have blocked the exchange of air so I did not get the actual new temperature as conditions changed since the new air did not/could not get circulated through past the sensor(s).  Perhaps also, some of the soil may have made some of the buttons sticky or at least clogged the vents a bit.

I brought the thermometer inside and cleaned the vents, charged the battery and studied the built in support bracket. I looks like this was intended to be mounted vertical, usually supported by a stand.

So, my plan now is to use freshly charged batteries and hang the thermometer just above the soil inside the Mini Cone Greenhouse rather than set it flat on the dirt. I had been looking for soil temperature as well as temperature inside the cone, but I probably should use a probe senor for that. I only have a oven meat thermometer of this type so will have to plan a soil temperature test for later.

In the mean time I got some overnight temperature using the other thermometer. Still need to check its calibration but the raw data was as follows:

Minimum temperature inside cone on night of 2011 MAR 22 was  -1 C
Minimum temperature inside cone on night of 2011 MAR 23 was +1 C

Maximum temperature inside cone during day of 2011 MAR 22 was +12 C
Maximum temperature inside cone during day of 2011 MAR 23 was   +7 C

Outside temperatures not recorded but there was frost on ground overnight.

One Faulty Thermometer

[It was later found that the thermometers may have given inaccurate readings, so these readings are suspect. DD.]

When you don't see the results you expect or want, it reminds me of the reporting that gene-splicing research was safe even through tests showed that it could create communicable disease.

http://www.saynotogmos.org/regulatory.htm

In the 1970s GMOs were of great political and scientific and social concern.
A study was done to test issues.
An experiment was rigged to produce a result indicating GMOs were safe to produce.
The results showed they were unsafe.
The results were never published in a major journal but reported as safe at a 1979 NIH press conference.
A science researcher found in archives evidence that the study and results had been tampered with.

Hmm?

Do I report that one of my minimum/maximum thermometer is faulty (can not reset readings) and results are therefore suspect?

I know the answer to that question.


I checked thermometer #1 late last night.
Inside temperature was 21 C and 85 %RH but I found I was then unable to read the minimum or maximum.

Thermometer #2 (That had previously be used to record outside temperatures) showed:
The inside reading late at night
Current    Inside temperature      0 C and 98 %RH
Maximum Inside temperature    4 C and  98%RH
Minimum  Inside temperature     0 C and 89 %RH


Minimum/maximum readings were reset to current readings.


In the morning the following was observed:
The inside reading of #1 was:
Current    Inside temperature      21 C and 85 %RH (unchanged)
Maximum Inside temperature     ? C and  ? %RH
Minimum  Inside temperature     ? C and  ? %RH


The inside reading f #1 was:
Current    Inside temperature      -1 C and 98 %RH
Maximum Inside temperature     +7 C and 98 %RH
Minimum  Inside temperature     +7 C and 98 %RH


There was still frost on the ground outside in the shade, but frost was gone from areas where there was sunlight.


There was no frost seen inside the Mini Cone Greenhouse.
Now to wait to see if the potato seeds grow.

Calibrating Thermometers

I just checked and reset the minimum/maximum therometers.
[It was later found that the thermometers may have given inaccurate readings, so these readings are suspect. DD.]The outside reading just before the sun set was
Current     Outside temperature 3 C and 90 %RH
Maximum Outside temperature 3 C and 92 %RH
Minimum  Outside temperature 0 C and 51  %RH

The inside reading just before the sun set was
Current    Inside temperature      24 C and 86 %RH
Maximum Inside temperature     24 C and  86%RH
Minimum  Inside temperature     19 C and 83 %RH

To Calibrate the Thermometers against each other I put both of them inside a Mini Cone Greenhouse.
As the second one I put in came from outside, it stated with a temperature of 3 C so I plan to reset it later tonight after it has warmed up so I don't get a initial discrepencey on minimum temperature.

In a future post I plan to prepare a summary table of temperature and Relative Humidity readings.

I am initially surprised with the narrow range of temperature fluxication within the Mini Cone Greenhouse +/- 2.5 C. This may be due to a moderating effect of the mass of the soil and a reradiating effect from the surface of the cone.

Snow!!

Snow!!
[It was later found that the thermometers may have given inaccurate readings, so these readings are suspect. DD.]I have planted 10 Mini Cone Greenhouses so far and this morning woke up to snow.
Inside temperature around noon was +21 C and 86 RH
There was condensation on the underside of the lid.
The Minimum overnight temperature was +19 C
There had been snow so outside and minimum local outside temperature was = 0 C.
The Maximum previous daytime temperature inside was +21 C
The maximum outside temperature was +2 C

Mini Cone Greenhouse update

Here is a bit of an update on the mini cone greenhouse.
[It was later found that the thermometers may have given inaccurate readings, so these readings are suspect. DD.]
I put a minimum/maximum thermometer inside the mini cone greenhouse yesterday. Overnight the temperature outside went down to -5.1 C in Yarmouth and there was frost here (I did not record the minimum outside here but I will tonight. In any event, there was ice and frost so it was 0 C or below outside. But inside the mini cone greenhouse the minimum temperature recorded was +11 C.

Also, the maximum reported temperature in Yarmouth (from http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/ns-29_metric_e.html ) was +2.4 C
The maximum temperature inside the mini cone greenhouse was +22 C

This is encouraging, except now I need to worry about overheating on a warn sunny day. Removing the lid should prevent overheating as it could then vent out the top.
The conclusion is I could plant potato seed now and have local new potatoes to sell before others have them available.
Do you consider this significant?

Spring arrives at a Mini Cone Greenhouse

I planted the first of my 2011 potato crop the day before the first day of spring this year. I covered it with a mini green house that was made of damaged green cone components.
I just created this blog post to get you thinking about this and get some comments from you. My objective is to get two crops this year by starting early.
What crops do you think might be suitable for this set up? This one is a sprouted red potato. This is an early short growing season variety of potato. My plan is to later, after risk of frost is over, to remove the mini green house and replace it with a raised bed made from the tire, presently holding the mini green house in place.
With this concept, we could plant a 1000 plants this way. Just need a place to grow them and a rototiller.

I covered the potato seed with soil before placing the cone over it and then I put a mini-max thermometer inside so by the next day would know the current range of temperatures compared to outside. The area is very wet so I do not expect the ground to freeze now. The first morning, for comparison, I found that there was no frost inside a cone with no lid that had been sitting near by the mini cone greenhouse although there was frost on the ground around it outside the cone.