About a month ago, we ordered a greenhouse kit from Amazon. Now I’m finally ready to start putting it together.
I’ve always loved starting vegetables and flowers for our garden from seeds. Shelly uses the flowers to fill all of the pots we put around the house every spring. It’s a new house and a new yard this year, but we are very much looking forward to having a nice big garden and lots of plants everywhere this spring.
At our last house, I started everything in the garage under compact fluorescent lighting, but here we have so much more room, that 1) We’d need to buy more lights to start all the plants, and 2) We’d be burning a lot more electricity than I’d like. (our bill is already too high as it is.)
So this year, we’re doing a greenhouse. One of the things I’d like to see is whether we can use it to winter over some of our plants, like fuschias or maybe even a potted citrus tree. There is a rose bush in the corner of the area I wanted to use, so I just decided that I’d keep it there rather than trying to replant it. It may or may not like being raised in a greenhouse, but it’s a tough plant. If it is happy in there, I’ll certainly let it stay.
The dimensions of the structure are 6′ X 8′ and so, I scratched out a little pad of dirt, graded it so that water would drain out to one side as opposed to pooling in the middle. I framed the plot with 2 X 6s, covered it in weed barrier and filled with gravel. It’s more or less level and square now.
Next, I built the actual base for the greenhouse out of 4 X 4 PT beams, notched out at each corner.
Once the footing of the greenhouse was square and level, I bolted it to the 4 X 4 beams so it wouldn’t blow away in a stiff breeze.
The kit itself, is easy to build, but it does take some time. The instructions are sequential pictures with almost no words in the entire manual. There are 64 steps in the construction and it’s supposed to take about 5 hours. I added a couple of niceties like a louvered panel for ventilation and an automatic vent opener for when the temperature inside gets too high, so there are a couple of additional steps for me.
Once I have it set up, I’ll make another post and show you around.