Have you cast a really critical eye around your greenhouse lately? Empty pots, dirty pots, cracked pots, and plants on their way out rear their ugly heads like a basket of snakes. How about the snatches of seeds in tattered and rolled up envelopes? Will you ever use them? During the winter I always manage to accumulate a conglomeration of seed catalogs in the greenhouse. By this time they are stuck together from having water splashed on them. The answer to all these problems is a thorough greenhouse cleaning, and June is a good time. Much bench space is always cleared when seedlings and bedding plants are put out in May. Painting and repairs can wisely be made at this time.
Staging a “come see our greenhouse”‘ party makes a real incentive for a thorough greenhouse clean-up, and depending on how sloppy you are, several open-houses may be necessary each year!
Do you have a regular feeding program set up in your greenhouse, or for your window garden plants? Malnutrition can cause vast disappointment in plants, but when a plant’s roots are limited to the small area inside a pot, it is doubly necessary that a complete fertilizing program be carried out. When such a program is followed closely, the texture of the planting medium becomes more important than its contents in most cases. One year I had some gloxinia tubers that needed potting in a hurry. I had no potting soil mixed so I snuggled them into pots of damp peat moss and kept up a regular feeding program with a liquid fertilizer. One of the plants produced 125 buds which all opened to make a long season of bright red blooms.
