I love your willingness to experiment. Growing food and plants requires experimentation in order to really know your soil. What kind of soil are you working with and what specifically didn't work? I think utilizing the plants that grow easily there is a wise place to start, any roots in the soil will feed the soil microbes and improve its structure. Unfortunately, when starting with poor soil you're either going to have to repair the soil by way of organic matter with time (cover cropping/running livestock) or money (amendments) In my experience, cover cropping is great, but can take time to work its magic, like you said. When I moved onto my new property, I needed it to start producing income for me fairly quickly. Luckily, the soil was in ok shape to start but utilizing amendments REALLY fast tracked my ability to grow healthy crops quickly. I put down a large amount of compost and an organic composted chicken manure product from Ohio Earth Food that is 5-3-2 and provides trace minerals as well. This year, after doing a soil test, I learned that the soil is actually not going to need any additional amendments. So it might cost money on the front end, but it will pay dividends down the road. Have you gotten soil tests done? This can help you target what exactly you need and how much so you don't waste any money that you don't need to. I've been hesitant to do these routinely in years past but find that they pay for themselves in the long run.

Raised beds are great for avoiding native soil fertility issues. They also are aesthetically pleasing and help delineate crops from walking paths, etc. Your pictures look great, I love the use of lights on the arches! I had an area of my property with a lot of gravel in the soil from a previous building being located there. So, naturally, it was a great spot for raised beds.

@Deborah Wyatt Dang, what a great harvest! I'm in the midwest and have two VERY young lemon trees I'm excited for them to produce but because... well... winter, I don't think I'll see anything like this! Any tips? What did you fertilize with? And do you happen to know the variety?

@Deborah Wyatt Great info here! Thanks so much for sharing :) I wish I could grow all those different types of tropical fruit! Hope the next season goes as well as this one!

This is a great question and congrats on getting a new piece of land! This is a unique challenge but what I might recommend is making it so that you need the least amount of irrigation runs as possible. If you can get all the plug trays and hanging baskets to be on an even plane, you can water them all with one run of misters. With them being on that type of shelving system, it would be very difficult to water those accurately with an automated system. I used to have that same closet racking system in my propagation house and it made GREAT vertical use of the space, it also required me to water manually with a watering wand in order to ensure proper watering. It also will kind of depend on how much pressure your water source gets as well. Certain systems need certain pressure in order to run properly and not blowout. Here's my recommendation which can be modified based on your budget: 1. Get this timer and plug it into your water source. These timers run on a couple AA's and should last a year so this might be easier than a solar one (which are a lot harder to find). Also, you can spend more on a timer if you want one that might be more reliable/durable. Depends on your budget. 2. This is a complete kit that will give you what you need in terms of emitters for hanging plants (the drippers) as well as the streamers for larger potted plants (depending on how large the pots/hanging plants are). You can run main lines from the timer to the base of the greenhouse, then up the posts and run them horizontally along the edges of the roof (above the hanging plants and trays). 3. Then you can make vertical runs of main line down the side of the racking, with these emitters facing towards the wall of greenhouse (so you're not getting the rest of your space wet). Those emitters are installed in the same way as the others in the kit so other than purchasing the emitters themselves you wouldn't have to add anything additional. 4. Step #3 Caveat and Personal recommendation: When automating watering trays on racks like those, you will get more even watering if you are able to set them on an even plane and then just have a single header line attached to the roof above them with emitters. You'll likely get better results. Less trays/cells drying out due to uneven watering. So it looks like they're might be enough space to set them all on a single level of racking and then just have the header run directly above them and use these types of hanging emitters. They would hang right of the line of trays and provide really even, nice coverage. These emitters need to be spaced every 3', so you'll need to measure the length to accurately calculate and purchase the amount you need.