Greenhouse but the growth is delayed due to the cold, it will give only 50% of production. Why?

[PhantomX7412]

The month of December. The greenhouse is built correctly, all beds with a status of +5 to temperature, chernozem + fertilizers. But the growth is delayed due to the cold weather, it will give only 50% of production. Flax. What am I doing wrong?

[Streetwind]

Flax has a temperature tolerance of -5°C. The greenhouse makes the plant treat the ambient temperature as 5°C higher, so effectively it can go to -10°C now.

Your ambient temperature dropped below -10°C at some point, and the plant got cold damaged.

Once the plant gets damaged, it doesn't recover.

[PhantomX7412]

4 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Flax has a temperature tolerance of -5°C. The greenhouse makes the plant treat the ambient temperature as 5°C higher, so effectively it can go to -10°C now.

Your ambient temperature dropped below -10°C at some point, and the plant got cold damaged.

Once the plant gets damaged, it doesn't recover.

Thanks

[sushieater]

The greenhouse benefit seems rather underwhelming, given the amount of time and resources involved in setting them up.

[Thorfinn]

Depending on where you start, you get maybe 6 months of growing season. A greenhouse can extend that to about 8.

Whether or not that's a big deal depends on how many seeds you gathered. If you have 400+ plants in the ground by mid June or so, you are right. No big deal. You will have linen enough to make more windmills than you can keep busy, and you will be throwing away food. But if you are below 100 seeds by then, there's a lot you are probably going to have to put off to year 2. In those cases, extending your growing season by 1/3 is a big deal. Granted you can accomplish even better by moving south for the winter, but unless you live a spartan existence, it's going to be hard to take much of your stuff with you, and you will use a lot more resources building a winter home.

Keep in mind you only need enough glass/glacier ice to cover half your greenhouse roof. 25 glacier blocks, or 12.5 glass blocks for a max sized greenhouse. That's only one-half block more than a bloomery load. And now with this new mapgen, glaciers are all over the place until you get way south, and can be mined even by hand. That could be a day 1 build, depending on your spawn/game settings.

[Thorfinn]

Oh, the other thing is that I don't think crops grow at all below 0C, so keeping them above that point makes a big difference early and late season. Especially as the nights get longer, if they start going more than half the day without growing at all, they may well not mature at all, let alone partial harvests.

[Thorfinn]

Hey, while I have everyone's attention  is the greenhouse bonus just a bonus, or can it be a penalty, too? If I plant, say, turnips, and the +5C for the greenhouse takes it over 27C (weird how I know that one offhand, eh), is that going to stunt growth? If so, is leaving the door open enough to avoid the problem, or do I have to knock out the door or even part of the wall?

While I build greenhouses(specifically, 5x5, 3+ high, internal, to maximize TP/glass ratio, (though technically, I suppose that would be 2x2, 3+ high, though that seems an absurd number of doors and intervening walls)) I've never really spent the time to figure out how to use them at the margin. And, as you can probably guess, on a temperate start, it's hard for me to justify them at all. The only reason is that if I'm in that magic place of latitude and altitude, I can grow crops year round, even in a temperate clime. It's not a matter of whether I should, but whether I can.

[EDIT]

More I think on it, a hallway with 2Wx6D probably optimizes for what I'm interested in. It does not optimize for scythe, no, but I rarely use scythe for crops, preferring to get the next rotation started on each tile ASAP, regardless of whether that throws off timing for the next harvest.

[/EDIT]

Edited August 10, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Jack Mackey]

I think it's also potentially a penalty. I recently had the same question and had a hard time finding information on it, but this comment is the only concrete answer I found that said it's detrimental in the summer (also easily tested - make a greenhouse, put 1 seed in it and after 1-2 days see if it has heat damage; I may test this myself later today):

As for keeping it cool - it is not sufficient to leave the door open (besides, this would allow rabbits in to eat your crops). The greenhouse works through room recognition, not insulation of the walls/doors. Doors being open/closed change the temperature we care about during the winter, but has no impact on it being a room or not, and so the +5c from greenhouse will stay in effect. This is easily tested if you want to wait around up to 5 minutes or so to open a door and see if the greenhouse effect drops from the tile information.

I would love to see a way to deal with greenhouses in the summer that don't mean changing the building. My greenhouses look super slick when the glass ceiling is in place, but only okay when I removed it for the summer. Something like a lever block that can raise slabs (especially at an angle) or something.

Edit:
I just verified that the door being open does not prevent the greenhouse effect. Still waiting out the heat damage testing.

Edit:
And I just verified that you will incur heat damage if the outside temperature + the 5C from greenhouse brings the heat above a plant's threshold. I tested this with turnips. Outside heat never went above 23C, but I had a greenhouse effect on the crops. They took heat damage and would give less yield.

Because the greenhouse effect only happens if you have a room, instead of taking out the whole ceiling I think I'm just going to remove the center glass panel - should maintain most of the aesthetic while avoiding heat damage in the summer.

Regarding the value: I'm unsure myself, as I didn't use them my first year (I barely grew anything). But, I should be able to get an extra complete rotation this year by using them, so they're probably worthwhile.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Jack Mackey

[Maelstrom]

Easy solution to cool summer greenhouses.  Remove one block from the structure.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Maelstrom