I’ve had my greenhouse for about six months now and it’s become a mainstay in the garden. But there are a lot of things I wish I knew before I designed it and it was built. So in this article, I’m going to take you through some of the things you have to know before you get a greenhouse.
Choose the Right Placement
First thing I found super important and very hard to decide. And it’s the placement of the greenhouse, guys. Much like a garden, accessibility is super important. You want to be able to walk out and access it so that your investment in the greenhouse is actually used. You get to actually walk in and enjoy the space. Secondarily it is the placement in relation to the sun. I actually was going to put the greenhouse in a spot that would have been blocked by the sun about 50% of the day. Stupid idea. Silly. Fortunately I was talked out of that and it is in this beautiful location right here in the middle of the garden. I can sort of garden around it, make it part of the space.
Prepare a Solid Foundation
No matter where you’re getting your greenhouse, you do need to do some work beforehand. Whether it’s something you just kind of pop up or a more structured system. We had to prepare the ground. And I didn’t really know quite what went into that until we dug into the details. So we had to make sure that we levelled the ground. Silly, but we had irrigation pipes running underneath. So we had to be very careful not to nick those.
And then we had to lay down the right type of fabric and gravel and build this wooden foundation out of four by fours before the build process started. And so that was a little bit out of my depth as far as skill goes. So fortunately a friend of Yard came down and lended a hand. I thought I was doing the right kind of prep. I bought one of those tools from a big box store that kind of levels the ground out. I put gravel down. Lo and behold, my eight by 10 foot shed, I put the gravel down in the wrong orientation, like shifted 90 degrees. Very silly of me. I still can’t live it down to this day. So remember an ounce of preparation worth a pound of cure. Just do it right from the very start.
Plan for Greenhouse Customizability
Once the greenhouse is installed, the options are limitless. And sometimes that can paralyze you. I remember when we put the gravel base in, which was the flooring of choice for me, I had these little cedar benches and that’s pretty much it. No lights, which we’ve since added, no shelving, no custom cedar bench. And so just these two things in here. And I was like, it’s a blank slate. I don’t know what I’m supposed to really do next.
So what I did is I had all my seed starting equipment, closer towards the sun. And we really just used the greenhouse as a seed starting space and got absolutely incredible results. Way better results than either starting indoors or starting outdoors in our warmer climate here. I think the customizability is something I didn’t really realize.
The greenhouse really can be whatever you want it to be. So for me, what we ended up doing is we built out a custom cedar potting bench. It is perfectly fit to the length of this greenhouse. But we made it really sturdy. And then we just used some really simple angle brackets that I just got at a big box store and some two by 10 wood to create additional shelving for some of these like ancillary tools, like a watering can or pruners that I can put off the growing surface.
Unlock Plant Variety & Reliability
So it really speaks to how much the greenhouse unlocks. I think when you think of one, you think, okay, cool. Like it’s a little warmer and a little more humid so you can start seeds faster. That is definitely true. But something I did not realize before I got it and actually started growing it out over the last six months is the sheer variety that it unlocks for you. The greenhouse helped me to grow some of my favorite plants. I have that there is 0% chance I would have been able to grow otherwise.
Now I have coffee. This is a plant that I had at the homestead for a long, long time, but it never thrived until it got into the greenhouse. I remember in Hawaii, I was obsessed with growing coffee as a kid. It’s like 12, 13, 14. I saw those trees. I said, someday I want to grow that. Now I actually can because the environment allows for it.
Manage Greenhouse Temperature Effectively
A piece that I was actually quite surprised by was just how hot it can get in the greenhouse. And it’s only about 80 degrees. So that gives me a sense of the temperatures the plants in here are experiencing. And then that gives me the ability to modulate. So I’ll tell you some simple ways we do it. And then some a little bit more fancy ways that we do it. The simplest would be this roto crank vent. This is a manual crank that I can just come up. So if it’s getting too hot, remember heat rises so I can vent out of the top and open that all the way up.
A slightly fancier version of this would be what’s called this louvered vent. So this system has a little piston and there’s some wax that will contract or expand based on the temperature. The third step is an exhaust fan that is connected to a thermostat and an intake vent.
Enhance Surrounding Landscaping
So there’s a lot of stuff you can grow in a greenhouse, no doubt. But what about growing around the greenhouse? When we first put our greenhouse in, we had basically nothing around it and it didn’t look that good until I let go a little bit and I planted some sunflowers, some nasturtiums. I let the garden creep a little bit this way.
I let my Royal Apricot tree kind of get a little close to the greenhouse to make it feel like it was part of the ecosystem. It’s where we spend a lot of time, start all of our seeds, migrate plants in and out to nurse them. And honestly, as winter comes, this will be the first winter with the greenhouse, moving peppers maybe out of the ground into the greenhouse to overwinter them. Something I haven’t experienced yet, but I’m very, very excited for.
Conclusion
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