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Money does not have to be an obstacle, when it comes to growing your own food. A lot of the foods we grow come from seeds that originated in the foods we ate, and much of our food, especially our tropical plants, have been started in a mini greenhouse.
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| Dragon fruit cacti grown in a mini greenhouse |
While we dream of having a beautiful greenhouse at the Land one day, the reality is that our current home sits on a 0.10 acre lot, and half of it is underneath a large tree canopy, so we have very little growing space. This will not prevent us from growing our own food, and we are getting quite the tropical food forest at the southern side of our house with grapevines, banana trees, papaya trees and more.
We have several southern facing windows, and in one of these windows we have set up a growing station. It a small foldable table full of pots in all sizes. Many of our growing containers come from milk jugs, and we also create free mini greenhouses out of ice cream and yogurt containers.
The family size ice cream gallon containers at ALDI work perfect as a mini green house, and the containers are so solid that you can use them again and again.
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| A future mini greenhouse |
How To Make A Mini Green House:
- Use a large yogurt container with a clear lid or a gallon ice cream container with semi-clear lid.
- Make holes in the lid with a screw, cork screw or similar
- Fill up the container with potting soil, leaving at least 2 - 3 inches free space.
- Add your seeds, cover with soil depending on the needs of the seedlings you're growing.
- Spray lightly with water, do not soak.
- Depending on the needs of the seedlings either place the mini-green house in the window or in indirect sunlight.
- Once your seedlings start appearing, remove the lids.
- Rotate the containers once or twice a week, to make sure everything gets an even amount of sunlight.
- Let your hands glide over the seedlings once in a while mimicking wind to make the seedlings stronger.
- Once the seedlings outgrow the container, move them to their own pots.
- Before moving the plants outside, make sure to acclimating them, by letting them gradually spend increasing time outside.
After making holes in the lid, we planted dragon fruit seeds in our new mini greenhouse.
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| Day 1 |
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| Day 3 |
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| Day 7 |
What do you use to make a mini greenhouse?
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