There’s no better way to eat locally than to grow your own food. Maintaining a home greenhouse lets you do that all year round. With a home greenhouse kit, installing and maintaining a greenhouse has never been easier. Because I’m such a huge fan of growing your own and eating local, I’ve teamed up with Emerald Kingdom Greenhouse this holiday season to highlight the benefits of having your own greenhouse. Maybe it’s time to put a home greenhouse kit on your Christmas list!

Why Put a Home Greenhouse Kit on Your Christmas List?

1) Go Organic More Easily

Growing your own food gives you the power to produce organic fruits and vegetables that aren’t contaminated by toxic pesticides and herbicides. It’s easier to protect your plants from infestations from bugs like Japanese beetles, tent caterpillars, locusts, spider mites, slugs, and other pests, as well.

Plus, when you’re able to create an ideal growing environment for your plants, with healthy soil and just the right amount of irrigation, additional fertilizers, which may be full of excess chemicals, may not be required.

2)Eat Locally Grown Food 12 Months a Year

A big benefit of having your own greenhouse is that you can grow many of your favorite vegetables 12 months a year. As long as you maintain the conditions inside the greenhouse that your plants require, you should be able to keep your greenhouse producing. Greenhouses enable you to garden 12 months a year, in good weather and bad.

3)Keep Your Plants Safe From the Elements

One of the great advantages of greenhouses is that they keep your plants safe from the elements. This is particularly useful if you live somewhere where the weather hits extremes, with very hot or cold temperatures, or even lots of winds or regular hailstones.

Apart from just generally keeping plants inside a greenhouse protected, this type of structure is also handy when you want to transplant some of your yard’s plants or grow new ones from seedlings or other small sizes. When they have been moved or are very young, plants can struggle to survive if meteorological events like dust storms, blizzards, and high winds come along and erode the soil and buffer them about too much, so this protection can make a huge difference. It will also save you from having to race home from another location to try and cover them up if the weather changes!

4)Create the Optimum Growing Environment

Another reason to utilize a greenhouse is that doing so gives your plants the optimum growing environment, regardless of the time of year. When you use these structures, you can typically set the temperature, light, feeding, and soil conditions to the ideal levels, even if the conditions outside are completely different.

When you can have control over these factors, it means you can plant new crops any time you’d like, rather than having to wait for a particular season. Ideal conditions also help fragile or smaller plants to grow more quickly, while giving you the chance to grow plants which normally aren’t found in your region because they’re not sustained by your local climate. Compost works great in the greenhouse, too.

NOTE: You can put a small home greenhouse like the one pictured above in the middle of an existing garden if you need to protect or cultivate plants that aren’t “ready for primetime” in the main garden yet.

5)Grow Flowers and Houseplants for Your Home and Yard, Even in the Winter Months

If you prefer to grow flowers and houseplants rather than food, a home greenhouse still does the trick. When you add a greenhouse to your backyard, you can quickly start building up your collection of plants, by propagating cuttings from existing plants, sowing seeds in flats you can transfer to pots or the garden, and cultivating exotic species like orchids and roses that might not otherwise survive outside the protection of the greenhouse. You’ll enjoy having a botanical paradise to admire in the depths of winter!

6)Enjoy Gardening Year Round, and Any Time of Day or Night

If you’re one of those people who loves to garden and hates to put away your tools when the bad weather sets in, a greenhouse lets you indulge your favorite hobby no matter what the weather. You don’t have to stop gardening when the sun sets either. Just string some lights in your greenhouse and keep going.

7)Make New Friends

Gardeners are a sociable lot! You could end up making lots of new friends or traveling to more interesting destinations if you join gardening clubs and associations as a result of your new passion for greenhouse gardening.

8)Develop a New, Healthy Hobby

If you haven’t started gardening yet, take it up as a new hobby. Even if you don’t think you have a green thumb or have never done any gardening at all before, you may find that once you have a greenhouse, this all changes.

Here’s another benefit: being active bending, digging, and otherwise moving about in your garden throughout the year will help you stay fit and get you out of your chair or off the couch.

Plus, it’s really fun to watch a seed turn into a tomato or a big head of lettuce!

9)Create a Soothing Place to Relax

You can get a home greenhouse kit that’s small and devoted only to plants. Or, get one that’s a little bigger so you can set aside a corner as a place to relax and de-stress. Put in a comfortable chair, some of your favorite gardening books, a journal and an electric kettle so you can make yourself a cup of tea. Ahhhh…

Ready to Get Started? 

You can probably find the home greenhouse kit that’s perfect for you at Emerald Greenhouse Kingdom. Let me know if you decide to put one up. Send pictures!

NOTE: Partners enable us to bring you the expert content you need to live the greener life you want. All editorial opinions remain our own. Thanks!

The post 9 Good Reasons to Put a Home Greenhouse Kit on Your Christmas List appeared first on Big Green Purse.