Tag: winter greens

Greenhouse step #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!