Posted by Gerty the Garden Gnome, on January 31, 2022.
Plants need three main elements to survive, sunlight, water, and air. They don’t need pests munching away at their leaves and damage from torrential rain. Gerty, the gnome can only do much to protect your precious veggies, but with help from the Sunny Growing Tunnel, your plants will be thriving and ready to eat in no time. Maybe a greenhouse is too big and bulky for your garden, or you just want to extend the growing season for some plants? With a growing tunnel, you can have vegetables all year round. Growing tunnels are simply placed over your precious plants with easy installation and fixed down with pegs. Gerty has five facts she wants you to know about the growing tunnel.
Accelerated Plant Growth
A growing tunnel works much like a mini greenhouse. The temperature inside the transparent growing tunnel can be heated by the sun five or 10℃ warmer than the outdoor temperature during the day.
Plants love all the heat they can get, so this much of an increase from a growing tunnel will accelerate plant growth, so you’ll have more fresh veggies on your dinner table.
Seeds often need warmth for germination. A growing tunnel creates a humid microclimate to speed up the tedious waiting game of germination.
Garantia UK’s Sunny Growing Tunnel will accelerate growth by enhancing soil quality. With lots of rain, nutrients can often get washed away from the soil quickly, leaving your plants with diseases like root rot and deficiencies. But the growing tunnel protects your soil’s structure and retains nutrients.
Water Recesses
Classic growing tunnels make the chore of watering even more difficult. If dragging a hose pipe around you wasn’t frustrating enough, with other growing tunnels, you have to lift up the plastic covering each time. But the Sunny Growing Tunnels have clever little water recesses on the top of the tunnel. These indents collect water, whether from the rain or your watering can, and carefully filter it to the plants in the tunnel.
Watering is one of the most vital areas to get right when growing your vegetables. Plants like to be watered deeply and prefer being watered over a long period of time rather than a quick splash with a hose pipe. It’s easy to overwater your crops accidentally, but Sunny Growing Tunnels takes the guesswork out of gardening and waters your plants slowly.
Easy To Vent
Ventilation brings in fresh air and CO2 to give plants what they need for photosynthesis. It also removes old air that could have an imbalance of CO2 and oxygen, slowly suffocating plants. Often with large greenhouses, plants can become smothered in the summer. But ventilation is easy with Sunny Growing tunnels. Either side is open so you can leave air to flow in during the day, then close at night to keep out pests with the Sunny End Cap Set. If you make the wise decision of buying more than one tunnel, they will click together so you can tilt one tunnel to let in the air too.
Supplying fresh air at night is essential to sustaining plant health. Did you know at night, most plants reverse the process of photosynthesis. They take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. This means that when daylight comes again, the plants take in stuffy air from the night before. The growing tunnels are lightweight and easy to lift, so you can remove the tunnel during the day if the summer heat is enough to keep your plant warm, then place it back again in the evening to keep them cosy and safe.
Pest And Weather Control
All gardeners have wandered over to their beloved veggie patch to find half-eaten lettuces, beetroots missing, or nibbled cabbage. We’re constantly battling against pests, but the most effective way of preventing unwanted visitors is by using a physical barrier like the SUNNY Growing Tunnel. Slugs & snails love munching on lettuce and will wipe out whole rows of crops overnight. Usually, gardeners have to use pesticides, but a growing tunnel protects young seedlings.
Your fruit and vegetable plants will be safe inside of the growing tunnel. With Sunny Growing Peg Set, your plastic tunnel is fixed down so deers, rabbits, or squirrels will have difficulty sniffing out lettuce and not even attempting to rob any.
Growing tunnels protect against all elements too. You can easily place and peg down horticultural fleece to protect your crops from frost or cover with shade cloth on a hot summer’s day. Wind and rain can damage and kill unprotected young seedlings; these weather conditions also erode and dry out your soil much faster if left unprotected. A growing tunnel reduces the need for water in windy conditions as the environment stays humid and moist.
Extended Growing Season
It’s infuriating how quickly spring and summer fly by; the long nights and cold days soon come around, which usually means it’s time to put the gardening gloves away.
With the Sunny Growing Tunnel, you can extend your growing period. As mentioned previously, having a plastic casing over your crops increases temperature and creates a humid environment; similar effects are found in the winter, too, as vital frost protection. Your growing system can be extended up to 60 days when using protection from cold weather such as a growing tunnel.
This means that you do not have to wait for the right season to plant your first seeds of the season. You can easily plant cold-tolerant plants somewhere in the middle of February. With Sunny Growing Tunnels, you can bring home and enjoy fresh veggies a month later into fall or even a month earlier in spring!
The Sunny Growing Tunnel goes hand in hand with the Sunny Cloche. Both are perfect for protecting plants and speeding up growth for a thriving veg patch all year round.
