Greenhouses

One of the big changes in our gardening occurred when we began using greenhouses.  In our personal history we built our first when when we lived on Redwood Drive in Santa Cruz.  It was quite ramshackle but functional.  When we moved to Big Lagoon (which is the northernmost section of Trinidad, at least in postal terms) we tried quite a number of things for seed starting like building trays for our south facing home windows, exterior boxes with heating coils and plexiglass lids, a plastic greenhouse with a zipper door, cold frames with used windows as lids.

Finally, we collected windows from our neighbors who were getting rid of them and seven years ago constructed our first greenhouse (now known as the hothouse).  Illijana made scale paper models incorporating the windows and doors we scavenged, and then we built it. We made a few mistakes, since corrected, but this hothouse has been a fabulous place to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer, and greens in the winter.  It has sliding windows for ventilation, and re-used tent poles in the interior for supports for growing plants.  It is "funky" but extremely functional.
     The second greenhouse we constructed and use was a Harbor Freight greenhouse.  It was amazingly cheap 6 years ago when we built it, and you still can't even buy the polycarbonate panels for the price they sell it for.  Ours is the 6'x8' version and in it we start our seedlings on heat mats, and grow hydroponic tomatoes each year.  It is a great addition.

I had to do a bit of repair on this greenhouse today.  Recent wind storms had damaged a rear panel so I had to use some clear packaging tape to seal the rip in the panel.  It was affecting the plants growing near it on the interior of the greenhouse by allowing a breeze to dry them out.

The interior of the greenhouse is ringed with benches we constructed of scrap scavenged lumber and old refrigerator shelving and used tent poles.  The floor is scavenged brick. You can see the heat mats on the lower tier of the left bench.
I was glad to get this patched, and it was a good rainy day project.