Tag: greenhouse

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.

Looking ahead Greenhouse #1

Although the first snowfall has happened here and the days end before 6pm there is a little bit of time left to finish up projects before winter really hits. This autumn we decided to tackle a project we have been putting off for a few months, but with winter coming and the beginning of a small market garden (again) next year it became an important job to tackle...a greenhouse.

As we are on such a small piece of land with so many trees we have very few places to put a greenhouse. There were three spots available:

1. in the pasture; not an option and too far away from the house
2. on the back of the house; we didn't want to get into such a big job yet
3. over the square foot beds; bingo!

Over the square foot beds it was. Now for the hard part. How were we going to build it? We didn't want to just run out and buy wood, although that is what I do much of the time. Tim, being the engineer type he is made sure we had a good model to work from. So he did all the measurements and transferred it all into a digital file that we could look at. It even gave us a list of materials we needed to buy.

This brought up the first dilemma - Do we use recycled materials or buy new. Buying new is easier and faster, but using recycled materials is more environmentally friendly. We talked this over and decided, mainly due to the time pressure of snow falling soon and my reluctance to sit in front of the computer to monitor Kijiji, Freecycle and the like for hours we bought new.

Off we went to the lumber store to get materials to build our 12x12 greenhouse. It wasn't going to be big, but it would have shelves for seedlings and a total of six small beds to start spring greens in. We also wanted to preserve some of the things growing in the square-foot beds a little longer, especially the beets as it seemed the ground was a better place to store them than in our cellar, at least we were going to find out!