Our raised bed square foot garden is now completely cleaned out. I was hoping the lettuces would survive, but the recent week of hard freezes did them in. All is now ready for more Mel’s Mix in the spring.
I’m reading the new book I got about using my greenhouse most effectively. Since it’s WAAAAAY too expensive to provide heat or cooling to the greenhouse, I’m concentrating on extending my spring planting season, figuring out when the best time is to start seeds so that I’ll have good plants to put out in the garden when danger of frost is past. Since I’m new at this, I’m making lots of notes, trying to get my act together.
In the meantime, I’ll start getting my greenhouse better organized. Right now I just have things ‘in’ the greenhouse with no particular thought to where and how I’ll start seeds later. I’m going to see if I can find some information on the net and will start moving things around.
The only plants I have in the greenhouse right now are the elephant ear plant and the purple passion plant I dug up before all the hard freezes started. Of course, NOW it’s getting up into the 50s in the afternoon, so with my luck, they’ll probably die in there from getting too hot! :0(
I found some old pictures of the greenhouse as we built it –
The dimensions are about 10 x 14. It has a dirt floor covered with two layers of weed barrier. The corners have steel rod welded to plates that we drilled holes and pounded into the ground with a sledge hammer. The plates were screwed into the wood. The ribs are pvc pipe. At first we held them to the wood with plastic pieces, but we’ve replaced several that couldn’t handle the strain with metal ones.
You’re looking at the north end of the greenhouse from the inside. We made tables from plywood and they go around both sides and across the north end. We left a spot in the northwest corner to hold a trash can filled with Mel’s Mix, plus brooms, and other tall stuff.
This is still the north end of the greenhouse, with the addition of an exhaust fan. When it’s hooked up to electricity, it opens when the temperature reaches a preset mark to draw air through the greenhouse for cooling.
This is the inside of the east side of the greenhouse. It will hold lots of supplies, though I’ll store as much of this as possible off the tables to give myself as much room to spread out planting trays and pots as possible.
Outside of the north end of the greenhouse. If you’ve been following the blog, you know that we had a break in the pvc pipe right at the top where it was attached to the wood. We ended up screwing large screws with rings onto the upright pieces of wood and arranging for guy wires to pull the end out, attached to a stake in the ground.
This seems like a really old picture, since there is now a 45 foot ham radio tower very close to the door on the south end of the greenhouse. You can see pieces of it in the left front of the picture.
This is the inside west side of the greenhouse. I’ll show you more pics as I get the greenhouse in some kind of order (I hope). I’m hoping I can find good ideas for how to arrange things. Wish me luck?
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