greenhouse

Working in the May veggie and herb garden

May 10, 2024 by tidybrownwren

The garden in May is just coming into its own. The veggies are planted and so are the herbs. Flowers for pollination are blooming and attracting butterflies and bees. This is my happy place.

The upcycled greenhouse (see the post here) has been busy cranking out plant starts and seedlings. The DIY cold frame helps keep seedlings warm in the unheated greenhouse. We only have to use it for 6-8 weeks – until the nighttime temps are warm enough to not harm the babies. Hubs made it with old storm windows. I’m able to remove the front when the greenhouse heats up.

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Sugar snap peas and oregano are nice, bright green touches in the early May garden.

This greenhouse garden is filled with flowers, bulbs, and perennials gifted by friends and family over the years.. The birds (and pesky squirrels) love the bird feeders. The squirrel guard helps most of the time.

After a long day of digging, weeding, and planting, this girl is tired. I love my new Dickies overalls that kept me dry and cool. I ordered a small because I’m only 5 feeet tall and I still had to hem them. They do have snaps to hold the hem rolled up, but I found them too bulky to tuck into my books. They are roomy and don’t get in the way of my colostomy. I’m pretty happy with them. My cooling cloth is super helpful in keeping me comfortable. I bought mine 10 years ago but here’s one like mine. I just wet it and wrap it aroundmy neck. It also keeps sun and mosquitos off of the back of my neck.

My hat is a Solar Escape foldable hat that I love. I use it for the beach, pool, and garden. It can’t be smooshed and always holds its shape. My boots are old Sloggers like these and they just won’t wear out.

Oh, that white stuff in the garden? I just added Azomite to all of my garden beds – once every 3 years or so.

Lessons in the Garden: Safe in the greenhouse

May 5, 2020 by tidybrownwren

Are the baby plants ready to leave the safety of the warm greenhouse yet? Check out the video as I share a lesson with my grandlittles about being safe and protected until it’s time to go out into the garden and why that is important.

Wondering how we made our greenhouse? Check out these posts:

The Upcycled Greenhouse – how it began

Our Upcycled Greenhouse – The Walls

Our Upcycled Greenhouse – The Roof and an Addition

Our Upcycled Greenhouse: The doors, siding, and details

October 11, 2019 by tidybrownwren

Welcome to the last post about how we built our upcycled greenhouse.

If you want to catch up on the other greenhouse posts, click on the titles to read them.

How it began.

The walls.

The roof and an addition

Doors and walls:

After the roof went on, it was time to add the doors and walls. Some smaller windows were also added to the top gable ends and siding was put around them. We used T1-11 siding to match our home.

Hubs (Papa to our grandlittles) frequently had a little shadow following him and muck boots are a necessity on our property.

The front door was an amazing roadside find. It was in perfect condition (just old and dirty), had the knobs still intact, and the crank mechanism was in perfect working order.

We placed it on the front of the greenhouse because the fan would be going on the back wall and we wanted to create a cross draft.

The siding took a while to put on but slow and steady is sort of our speed.

Before the painting could begin, I had to reglaze about 20 of the window panes. It was tedious work, but not hard.

Painting:

I began to paint the lower half of the whole greenhouse, saving the upper part for later when I would need to use the ladder. Secretly, I was hoping a painting fairy would come by and finish it in the middle of the night.

We found some old siding in our barn and it was enough to use as a skirt around the whole greenhouse. I finished it with an exterior varnish. You can see how beautiful the right side of the wood plank was with the varnish on it.

I chose to not tape the windows before painting them. To me, it’s easier to scrape the excess off with a blade.

Well, the painting fairy never came but the snow showed up so it was time to put the painting on hold.

Fan:

We took advantage of having an extra set of hands and some warmer weather when our son was home for a visit and the fan was installed. We had a licensed electrician run electricity to everything because greenhouses are wet areas and need special conduits and switches. It’s always good to be careful when water and electricity mix.

When the weather warmed up, we were able to get the rest of the siding up and the painting finished. It took me F-O-R-E-V-E-R to paint and scrape all of the windows (inside and out) but it was worth it.

Side story: I decided, before finishing the painting, that I didn’t like the color. I wanted a sage green, but the first coat looked more like that green fluffy pistachio pudding dessert that our grandmas used to make for church pot luck suppers. So. . . I found a better color and repainted everything. Ugh! Are you smiling because I have a green greenhouse?

I couldn’t wait to put plants in the greenhouse, so I set up a folding table and started some seedlings in my long-awaited green greenhouse!

Accessories:

We dragged the potting bench over to the covered area and put it in place. Hubs and our son built it for me for my birthday one year. It is made from a vintage cast iron double sink with built-in drainboards and odds and ends of wood from our barn. It is one hard-working piece of carpentry!

Inside the greenhouse, the areas on either side of the walkway are lined with shelves.

We made them out of cinderblocks, closet shelving, and 2x4s. We must have looked pretty strange putting together a proto-type in the middle of Home Depot.

These custom-built beauties are sturdy, work great and are very efficient. I couldn’t be happier with them.

We varied the shelf heights to accommodate bins and seedling trays.

The closet shelves allow for water and dirt to drop through to the ground.

The bins are simple Sterlite storage bins. I made chalkboard plaques and they are attached with rivets to the fronts of the bins.

The finishing touches to our greenhouse were the wreath on the door (hung with a galvanized wreath hanger), the lighting (matches the exterior lighting on our home), and the twinkle lights hanging from the rafters.

This has become one of my happy places and I try to spend time in it every day.

Our Upcycled Greenhouse – The Roof and an Addition

October 5, 2019 by tidybrownwren

Thanks for joining us for the next edition of “We built a greenhouse out of old stuff”. Well, maybe not all of it was old. Some of it had to be purchased with hard-earned cash.

The roof of our upcycled greenhouse was the most expensive part of the build. We used greenhouse polycarbonate roofing from Home Depot and had to order some special pieces that they didn’t carry in the store.

Rafters

Hubs pre-built the rafters in our garage. He test-fit the first one to make sure the measurements were correct. We took advantage of some strong muscled family members after a Father’s day dinner. Supervisors were needed too – both young and old.

Once we knew the measurements were correct, I painted all of the rafter sections with two coats of paint. We knew it was much easier to paint before they were installed than after.

The front and back sections were held in place with supports while a crossbar was put into place

Once the crossbar was in place, we hoisted the other sections up and rested them on the walls.

They were screwed in, one by one, and then narrow strips of wood were added for additional strength for the roof panels. On top of those strips, Hubs added specially molded pieces called plastic closure strips.

An Addition

Before the panels went on, Hubs decided that we needed a covered area for my potting bench so we added an addition to the greenhouse! Tying in the roof lines took a bit of extra brain power (not mine, of course).

Roof panels

The panels on that side of the greenhouse were extended.

You can see the plastic closure strips in these photos.

The final panels went in and it was beginning to look like a bonafide greenhouse!

Did you miss the first two posts about Starting the Greenhouse and Building the Walls? Just click on the words to go to those posts.

The next post will be all about enclosing the greenhouse, adding the trim, and putting in the doors.

The Upcycled Greenhouse – how it began

September 20, 2019 by tidybrownwren

If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you have certainly seen our upcycled greenhouse. Many have asked for details so I thought I would share a few posts about how we built it.

I won’t be going into very many specifics because it was built from scraps and used items which would be very hard for anyone to duplicate.

Our initial ideas for the greenhouse expanded as it was being built. We had no idea, at the beginning, that it was going to be so perfect!

For every celebration (my birthday, anniversary, Christmas, mother’s day) Hubs would point to a new addition to the greenhouse and tell me that it was my gift for that holiday. I would do a happy dance and give him a giant thank you hug – and then begin to give him ideas for the next “gift”. What else could a girl want?!

So here’s how it started:

First, we collected windows and doors for about 4 years. We didn’t worry about what size they were, we just made sure they were basically all the same style. For us, that was wooden windows with multiple panes and doors that were interesting. We found windows and doors on the side of the road (roadside rescue is a hobby for many of my friends and they would text me if they found something).
We saved all wood, bricks, and supplies from our kitchen remodel.
I fervently looked at tons of inspiration photos online.
Finally, one day, we decided that we had enough supplies to start the project. We laid all of the windows out on the grass and, like a giant puzzle, moved them around until we had 4 pieced together window wall sets. We arranged a North wall, a South wall, an East wall, and a West wall. Then, we labeled each window with a code (Direction + size) so that we could stack them in our barn as a set. I should point out that we did not attach them together until later.

5. Next, we grabbed all of the bricks we had removed from our kitchen remodel (we replaced our previous brick floor with a wood floor). We had to chip off the extra mortar which took a few hours.

6. Before we could lay the pavers, we needed to map out the greenhouse floorplan. We used cinderblocks and wood to layout the walls and then planned a brick walkway to go down the center of the building.

7. It was finally time to lay the bricks in a bed of landscape fabric (to prevent weeds) and sand with a paver trim (to keep the bricks in place). We worked for a few hours to plan a pattern that would keep us from having to make a bunch of cuts to get the bricks to fit. In the end, we only needed to make 2 cuts!

What happened next? You’ll have to wait for the next post. But I’ll give you a hint – it involves wood.