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Heat Plant Beds, Not Greenhouse
With fuel prices burning a hole in everyone's budgets, Ron Khosla has a suggestion to cut costs when starting seedlings in late winter. The market gardener heats his plant beds, not his greenhouse.
"We've reduced our propane use by 90 percent compared to folks we know with similar size greenhouses," says Khosla.
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Heat Plant Beds, Not Greenhouse 32-5-7 With fuel prices burning a hole in everyone's budgets, Ron Khosla has a suggestion to cut costs when starting seedlings in late winter. The market gardener heats his plant beds, not his greenhouse.
"We've reduced our propane use by 90 percent compared to folks we know with similar size greenhouses," says Khosla. With his wife, Kathryn, he supplies more than 200 customers with fresh produce in-season. That requires a lot of transplants, and that means starting a lot of seedlings and keeping them healthy.
The Khoslas lay 1/4-in. plastic tubing under seedling flats and connect it to the outlet of a small water heater. The tubing is the same kind used in solar water heating systems; only here it's used to radiate heat, not collect it.
"The key is we are heating the flats, not the air," says Khosla. "A soil temperature probe activates the recirculating pump to push water through as needed. The heater only kicks on when the water temperature drops to the set point."
Benefits include delayed seeding, faster emergence, reduced disease problems and fuel costs of around $125 per year for a 1,500 sq. ft. greenhouse. That compares attractively to the $800 or more needed for a similar size, traditionally heated greenhouse.
"We can start our plants a week to 10 days after others in our area, and ours will catch up," says Khosla. "They grow faster and have healthier root systems with more root growth. It's also a dryer system, so we have fewer problems with damping-off disease. If the soil surface gets moist, we just turn up the heat a little."
Khosla admits the system requires more labor on he and his wife's part. "We have short hoops over the flats so we can lay row covers over them every night," says Khosla. "But, because we're only heating the flats we need, we start small and expand as we go. With standard systems, you have to heat the entire greenhouse, even if you only have seedlings on two tables."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Ron and Kathryn Khosla, 205 Huguenot St., New Paltz, N.Y. 12561 (ph 845 810-0033; farm@flyingbeet.com; www.flyingbeet.com).
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