Irrigation systems for greenhouse growing
Most greenhouse advice tells you how to design cooling systems. Nobody tells you what to do at 2 PM on a Tuesday when the forecast said 34°C and your thermometer reads 42. That happened to a tomato grower I talked…
Most greenhouse growers spend their first year tweaking irrigation schedules by feel. The second year, they figure out the real variable isn’t the crop or the climate controller. It’s what the plants are sitting in. The growing medium you pick…
Most greenhouse growers I talk to think about irrigation in terms of water delivery: is the crop getting enough, is the EC in range, are the drippers clogged? That’s half the picture. The other half is what your watering schedule…
Most greenhouse growers I’ve talked to spent way more time thinking about their covering material and heating system than their irrigation setup. Which is strange, because the irrigation system is what you interact with every single day. Get it wrong…
I watched a tomato grower in Almería, Spain drain 4,000 liters of irrigation water into a gully behind her greenhouse and thought: that’s not runoff, that’s a second paycheck going down the drain. Greenhouse water recycling isn’t some lab experiment…
Why Hand-Mixing Fertilizer Is Costing You More Than You Think Walk through a greenhouse in midsummer and you will see the same thing everywhere: someone dragging a hose, mixing a tank of fertilizer by eye, guessing at concentrations. It works.…
I spent three years running a 2-hectare greenhouse operation in Kenya before I figured out that half the irrigation gear we bought was unnecessary. Not useless, just not needed. The suppliers had sold us on a “complete system” that included…
