Must-have greenhouse features for a successful growing season

When it comes to choosing your greenhouse, it’s not just the external structure you need to think about (although a solid base and high-quality materials are of course essential!). There are several integral features and accessories that play a key part in ensuring a successful growing season, such as shelving, shading and ventilation.

Here, Cultivar Greenhouses explains the different features and accessories that can be added to your greenhouse and how they can help you get the best out of your crops.

Add extra growing surfaces

Staging and shelving is excellent for incorporating additional grow space inside your greenhouse. Not only does staging and shelving provide space for carrying out essential gardening tasks such as potting up and storing tools, but also provides vertical space to house seedlings and established plants. With a Cultivar Greenhouse, you can choose to include shelving and staging across one or both sides of the greenhouse, opting for extras such as stainless steel baskets to store tools and pots. When plants are showing signs of outgrowing their shelves, they can be folded down to provide more height, or simply more floor space for a table and chair to enjoy a cup of tea after a hard day’s work.

Protect tender plants with shading

Whilst the glass of a greenhouse is what makes the perfect growing environment, during the summer months, the sunlight and heat can become overpowering and lead to wilting and sun-damaged plants. Installing shading into your greenhouse will allow you to protect your plants on those bright summer days, ensuring they get just enough sunlight to keep on growing without causing any damage. Made from a synthetic polyester skrim, the Cultivar Greenhouses shading is hard-wearing, and moisture resistant, with installation taking a matter of minutes. Simply pull the shading down on more sunny days and open them back up to allow more sunlight into the greenhouse on dull days.

Keep your plants well ventilated

From spring through to autumn gardeners should be ventilating their greenhouses to provide sufficient air flow to circulate and regulate the internal temperature and humidity throughout. This will help dissipate excess heat and ensure a steady flow of oxygen to prevent plants overheating and wilting, allowing them to thrive. When purchasing your greenhouse, its key to ensure vents are included, whether these are manually opened or automatically.

Automatic vents come as standard with a Cultivar Greenhouse, using the internal temperature, the wax-filled cylinders expand once they reach optimum temperature, opening the ridge and floor vents automatically. As the temperature cools down, the cylinders contract, closing the vents when needed.  The greenhouses within the range at Cultivar Greenhouses have both upper and lower vents which creates a chimney effect. Cooler air is drawn in through the lower vents and circulated around the greenhouse, with the warmer air being expelled from the top vents maintaining an optimum growing environment for plants.

Help plants grow in the right direction

Alongside the main greenhouse features, you can add smaller accessories to many greenhouses to ensure your crops are growing in the right direction. Cultivar Greenhouses offers the option to add a cucumber ladder to the side of your greenhouse, to encourage cucumbers to wind their tendrils around the twine, providing stability as it continues to grow upwards towards the light. Grow bars are another great addition to your greenhouse, allowing you to string up tomatoes, and secure talk growing plants and crops.

If you’re looking for a greenhouse to start growing your own fruit and vegetables, Cultivar Greenhouses offer superior structures made from sustainable Accoya wood and aluminium, available in Victorian and Modern styles in a range of sizes to suit your space. 

Find out more about Cultivar Greenhouses and discover more growing tips at www.cultivargreenhouses.co.uk

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Arianne Davey

Arianne is a digital contributor, with a Journalism degree and Marketing masters, from the University of Lincoln. In her own time you'll find her exploring new cities and travelling as much as she can!

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