Green Growers Maxim #1 -"Anybody who thinks that gardening begins in the spring has wasted the fall and winter".
One of the important advantages that I came to realize in the early spring was the possibility and opportunity to now get bedding plants (starters) seeded and growing early. I had advanced starters growing as early as February in the main solar greenhouse. I realized that, with a good quality conventional second greenhouse, I could get those starters moved into an interim location, to clear space in the main greenhouse, and thereby be able to transplant them into an outside garden as early as the last frost would allow. Consequently, now it's possible to transplant, for example, tomatoes that are already blooming or even bearing fruit. Thereby, you can begin to pick from your outside garden, vine-ripened tomatoes and other ripe vegetables as early as May even in this cold climate region. This is much better than having to wait until the end of August or even September to begin to pick tomatoes while often worrying about the first frost destroying them. This happened to many of us in late summer 2009.
Additionally, the second greenhouse allows me to clear space in the solar greenhouse all summer long which allows me to almost double production. And finally, it also allows me to be able to use the conventional greenhouse as a control facility to measure the advantages of the solar greenhouse. To that end, I'm now also taking daily readings and noting the current temperature, maximum and minimum over the previous 24 hour period and the relative humidity in the second greenhouse to compare with the solar greenhouse prototype.
