Projects

All Done, Greenhouse # 4

After a bit of a web break the greenhouse "saga" will be finished. I guess that is a bit of an overstatement isn't it. Regardless. The greenhouse is finished and has weathered the winter weather beautifully. We have even had people over and compliment us on it too. Not bad for a couple of rookies that really have no idea how to build something like this. There are two doors, one on each end. This is so we can get a cross breeze in the summer. Above the back door there is also a transom to let any excess heat escape. The other one will be put in in the spring as the less heat we loose right now the better. The original square foot box frames were kept to create seedling tables for the spring. It is really exciting to know that we will be able to get a full day sun on our seedling his year. No more bringing flats in and out of the house, or shuffling trays to the top of the indoor greenhouse three times a day. The plan is that five of the six small  beds will have a plant rotation. We are going to put a small aquaponics system in the greenhouse for the summer. Currently the thought is to not do tilapia, but focus on White Perch instead as they can tolerate colder waters. We are not sure what effect it will have. With luck it will be able to heat the greenhouse next winter along with a compost pile with the help of a stock tank heater or something similar..  To try and create a kind of eco-system inside the little house will be fun and I am sure many unexpected things will end up happening. The central beds are made of compost. We are making a half-hearted attempt to heat the house with compost, but as much of our hot poop from the barn was frozen it hasn't gone very well. We will be far better organized next year. Right now we are seeing what the traditional filled pop and large water bottles will do in the greenhouse. It is supposed to moderate the temperature in side the house as the water goes through a phase change and give off heat. We are not too sure that it is working, but we'll wait and see. Now the holidays are over we will spend a bit of time in there and do things like put them in the compost and get some fresh manure to heat with.So far this year the coldest it has been in the greenhouse was -5C and the hottest has been over 30C, but that was before the snow flew. During the true winter weather the warmest it has been in the greenhouse is 14.4C.  There is a little oil filled heater on a timer to also help moderate the temp. Now sure if that is working either right now. Just because we finished the structure, it doesn't mean that we have finished the project. This one is just beginning.

Looking ahead, Greenhouse #3

The biggest thing we kept coming back to was the soundness of the greenhouse structure.We can get some high winds off the fields behind us during the winters, and even in the summers so making sure the greenhouse didn't blow apart became important. So after some more shaking and head scratching we put in more supports. The first place we put more support was on the roof. As you can see from step #4 there is a huge open area where the roof would be. Thinking of that great expanse of plastic didn't make us smile. We could just picture it becoming a big plastic bucket for snow after the first fall. This was a bit of a challenge as the roof was getting a little high and working that high on uneven ground could be a bit scary at times. We didn't need for one of us to fall down and really hurt ourselves. Adding crossbars on the lower section also made us feel a little better (not in these pics). We talked about putting more supports inside the greenhouse, but thought it would make it far too difficult to move around in especially when doing seedlings. After we got the structure up we had to concentrate on the doors. Of course neither of the doors were not square so this was a bit of a challenge. Once again we had to go out and get more wood to make the doors.

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Looking ahead, Greenhouse #2

Of course, like many projects it all looks so easy when it is on paper. But like many things, reality is much more complicated than the idea behind it and there are things that can never be anticipated. The measurements were the standard length lumber of around 12 feet. of course we couldn't actually fit a 12 foot piece of lumber in the car so we had to deal with that too. These all made things more complicated. We did think of snow load, and wind direction so we thought we were covered. Of course, because the greenhouse has been built over existing boxes, we didn't have a lot of wiggle room. So after the first part was up we had a light shake of it and both it and we shuddered. We knew that the structure wasn't going to stand up to much. So we put some more supports up and cross braces. The one thing that kept coming back to bite us was the fact that nothing was level and nothing was truly square. But it was square enough so we kept going. The door "frame" went in, and of course, that wasn't square either. The wood we bought wasn't enough for the project, even though we had our "list". Off we went again to the lumber store and promptly blew our budget. As of yet we hadn't thought much about the plastic that we were going to use on the house. At first we were going to use heavy duty painting plastic, the stuff used to cover your furniture when painting a room. We even bought a roll of it, but in our haste we misread the numbers and realized that it wasn't going to fit in an efficient way. I know this all sounds quite silly, but keep in mind that we originally wanted to make this on a very low budget. By now we had realized that our budget was larger and that we needed to do this at least sort of right. So we bought real greenhouse plastic. Looking back this is the best thing we could of done, because it at least has some degree of UV protection. So, we were on our way slowly but surely.