Go greenhouse. I do vertical growth indoors and it is great;
however, in my opinion there is a lot more you can do in a greenhouse
environment. Also, you are doing supplemental lighting in a greenhouse so a lot
of utilities will be significantly less.

I think the main questions are:

• Do you plan on growing year round?
• What are you looking to grow?
• Is this a hobby or semi-serious thing?

I appreciate the feedback! Yes this will be a serious attempt at becoming a self standing business. I have a over sized double detached garage. It is currently 3/4 insulated and has electric heat ( i can bring in natural gas from my house 5ft away). I heated it the other winter and it ran about $270 one month and kept it at 45F ( turned it off when I opened that bill!). I currently am doing a small scale feasibility study in my basement with T5 lighting to figure out yields and expected grow time frame. I have had no problem finding local establishments interested in purchasing. we have talked about the starting volume and purchasing price... which is what they are already paying to have it shipped in. So far I am growing basil, cilantro, bib lettuce. Basil seems to be most successful so far, lettuce seems to be coming good now, and cilantro will need another attempt. I am only on day 24 of my experiment and figure I can only improve from where I am at. I do fully intend to grow year around.

Jeremiah, What added flexibility does the green house give vs indoor vertical?

Ok. So growing
commercially is a very different beast and I agree with kleeem on the
calculations. I have grown broccoli on the commercial level indoors as an fyi.

So an advantage of
growing in a greenhouse is the use of prior existing conditions. You can do things
like use compost to heat your greenhouse while creating substrate to grow your
plants in.

You can also take
advantage of the summer and/or winter to cool or heat the building. Typically
plants like type be kept around the 60oF area. Any colder or warmer
can either inhibit nutrient absorption or growth. SO this means when growing
indoors you have few options to heat or cool outside of a traditional sense.

Let me walk you through
my indoor NFT setup.

For my strawberries I
have four rows of gutters. I have four T5 lamps over them with only two of the
four lamps filled at 10” height from plants. I have a heater down there for
when temp drops in the winter and a fan to simulate wind.

The T5’s run on a 18/6
cycle with the fan adjusting randomly for different types and gusts of wind.

With an outdoor setup I
would only have to run my T5’s to compensate for the sun and I could open the
windows in the summer to allow for natural gusts of wind to come through. I
could also use either propane heat in the winter, or as I would prefer to use a
composting system to heat the water and building as it runs through the system.
If you are interested I can link you a couple systems for background.

The greenhouse gives
added height as well. My basement is only 6’ tall, so growing vines and
tomatoes can be a challenge; whereas with a traditional greenhouse I can grow
them to the roof and then allow them to grow back down since I am not worrying
about light penetration or light heat on the leaves.

But in growing in the
outdoors you have to have redundancy on the heaters, just encase, and
constantly be adjusting for light changes.

So, just to give some
more input, typically I see cannabis growers growing purely indoors as well as
large scale agriculture oversea plantations.

For the smaller setups
(300 heads of lettuce a week) I typically see a greenhouse setup with light
acting as a supplement.

I hope this helps!

Do you have a link to
the type of greenhouse you are going with?

There are a lot of variety
out there and choosing the right one can be difficult. There are the more
traditional ones that are all glass that can be quite expensive but have a of upsides;
whereas, plastic dome ones work just as well just require a bit more maintenance
in some areas.

I know a lot of farmers
that use a wide variety. If you have any questions I can always bounce it off
some of them.

I was originally going to try the NFT system but decided to try out the DWC to start out with to find a baseline. After lots of research i think I may go with a system of the Kratky method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDYeffYcVkY It seems like there is less to go wrong and less maintenance.

Maybe there are reasons against it that I am unaware of?

I am leaning towards my garage at this time because we are looking for houses to move into the country. So likely we'll have a move within the next 12 months. My thoughts are I'll need 99% of the items from growing indoors to growing in a green house as well. I'm hoping by the time I get things going fluently we'll have found a new place, I'll have outgrown my garage, and I will then have the room to expand in the new yard. In town here I will likely be running into allowed roof/driveway square footage issues with my lot size as well. another reason why I'm thinking about going with the Kratky method is I can still go vertical with them without much issue. Used pallet racking is cheap. Seems like a NFT systems aren't used growing vertically, you know why this is?

I'm also hesitant with the cost to heat/cool a green house here. We can hit -40 in the winter every once in awhile and over 100 in the summer a few times. Land is flat here as well. Maybe 100ft drop every 10 miles (red river valley in Minnesota). Biggest hill here is a dike someone put up to protect themselves from the spring flooding. I've looked around here and there for green houses online, but not enough to make any sort of decision on brand or style. I've reached out to a couple places, but haven't gotten any returned phone calls or emails. If you have any suggestions feel free to let me know.

What made you go with the t5 vs leds? I'm using a t5 but will likely buy some leds to test before I start purchasing for a larger grow.

figured out why my cilantro is doing so crappy. I have it in the same dwc as basil. Yesterday my cilantro looked like it found life and my basil was looking droopy. checked my ph and it was 8. adjusted it to 6.5 and this morning my cilantro looks droopy and my basil is turning around.

Morb1lee,

As a side note, check out this before cross planting.

http://www.gardenersnet.com/atoz/phlevel3.htm

When planting crops you need to be aware of plant paring.
Different plants use different nutrients and require different pH’s. Pairing plants
wrong can lead to a host of problems with nutrients, disease control, etc.

Ok, so now jumping into the Hydroponic method. The Kratcky
method is simple but hard to master. I would suggest looking into MPH Gardener
(https://www.youtube.com/user/mhpgardener).
His YouTube channel is dynamite and has a good explanation of the pros/cons of
the Kratcky, far better than I can post in text.

I always prefer RDWC as a start. It is simple to start and with
the right nutrients even easier to keep going.

The reason I went with T5 over LEDs is actually the price
and international shipping. I started off with an HPS and then was going to
upgrade to LEDs. I ordered a bunch from China; however, customs’ then wouldn’t release
them to me so I ended just going to Home Depot and buying the T5 lights that they
have, then wiring them up (I used to do entertainment lighting so it was simple
to do for me). I mainly did what I did for price points. The LEDs are great for
long term; however, for a low cost startup venture it can be a little bit too
much to buy the amount you need. That is to say if you are using them to
replace a HPS of CFL system instead of supplementing it.

It seems like you are going hardcore into this. If you want,
send me a message and/or give me a call (# in my profile). I do hydroponic lighting
for a living and can help you out. Also, I can impart some start up wisdom for
you if you want it.