Category Archives: greenhouses

A January 11th photo of the oldest (2007) greenhouse:  Reemay covers are off so the leaves can absorb some rare winter sun.   I planted this one with kale and salad greens back in late September.  These will be completely harvested by late March and then I’ll convert this greenhouse into a seedling nursery.  Right now, though, I take twelve gallon-size bags of salad- and braising greens a week out of the greenhouses and outdoor gardens for our customers, and we also eat about a half gallon daily.

In December, Tom and I attended a thank-you brunch for doing some fundraising for our daughter’s school.  It was held at a swanky country club in the dunes near us and, as I walked into the bar area to refill my Bloody Mary (brunch, you know) all heads whipped around to see me.

Obviously, Tom was in the bar giving away our farm, one bag of salad and one log of chevre at a time.

“Duuuude,” I hissed.  “You can’t be doing that,” I told him, grabbing him by the elbow and goose-stepping him away from the crowd, after demurring to all the other parents gathered around.  “Don’t you know I have every drop of milk and leaf of green spoken for from here to April?”  I don’t think he really did know:  he’s not involved with either gardening or milking.

“Maybe we just need another greenhouse,” he said.  “I have no problem at all building another greenhouse.”

And this is the 2008 greenhouse, the bigger one:  I planted these salad/root veg things in October.  They’re growing more slowly; they won’t be “peak” until mid-Feb. and then they’ll be “done” in late April, right about when the tomatoes go in and the warm season starts again.

It’s been on my list for a while (a third greenhouse, that is).  And it’s at this time of year that I can see why I most need one, though the greenhouses are the most busy and productive in the warm months.  My reasons for wanting another aren’t to supply the other parents’ refrigerators, though.  They’re more mundane, like, if I had a third greenhouse I could use it to grow worm-free brassicas in the summertime (joy! no Bt, no covers) and I could plant a LOT more garlic and a lot more root veggies.  It’s green greed is all (insert evil laugh).

So in April, we’ll add another.  This one will be 16′x32′.  Stay tuned…

Rapidly heading cabbages, freshly sprouting shallots and root-cellar potatoes means it’s colcannon season.  With bacon bits and goat-milk yogurt, it’s a one-pot hearty meal…especially if paired with a salad.

The one thing I cannot stress enough for those of you considering these plastic bubbles is this:  Having one extends your growing season.  In my experience at zone 6, it extends it in two months in each direction.  Four more months of growing things!  Think about your haul if you had four more months in which to grow your goodies.

I grow things year-round in them, of course, like that pretty head of late September-seeded savoy cabbage above.  Through the months of December-February, though, the greenhouses act more like big produce refrigerators than places in which things are actively growing.  But it is at this time of the year, early March, that I have a particular appreciation of them.  You see, late February/early March here means there’s still snow on the ground outside…nary a thing outdoors is “growing,” though there are a few hardy things hiding out there under the snow.  Indoors, however, it might as well be late April/early May.

Everything in the greenhouse, in other words, has hit the Spring button.  Chives and scallions are leaping out of the ground…a great thing, as my chevre loves chives, long missed since their November die-back.  Seeds of the February-planted fava beans and peas are shooting up.  The garlic is 8-9″ tall.  The lettuces, long picked-at and just hanging in there, are now growing madly.  The cabbages are heading faster and faster.  And the arugula, mache (corn salad) and fall-planted kales are at the point of bolting.

Sure, it’s nice to sit in there too…especially if you consider the alternative:

Abandon all gardening hope, ye who enter here

Coffee, dog, greens, greenhouse and snow on an overcast Wednesday morning

What a winter!  Even though I love this season, this particular one has knocked me off my orbit a bit…and I have been bobbling on, more eccentric than ever.

Time to get my bearings.  I think what was hardest for me this winter was the even more pronounced lack of sun.  Because we’re so close to the lake, we’re usually fairly shrouded in clouds between November and February.  A good and bad thing (good:  it’s so much warmer, bad:  clouds mean precipitation), those clouds.

But the earth is tilting, and as it tilts the clouds retreat.  To help my cloud-induced fugue state I have decided to spend part of my morning the way I spend it in the warm months of the year:  I take my 2nd cup of coffee outside with me to the garden.

Granted, at this time of the year, the snow-covered garden is not terribly interesting.  But the old greenhouse?  It’s a light box, even when cloudy.  Wear the sunglasses, take off your outerwear, grasp that mug in your hands and take a seat.   If only for 10-15 minutes, it really does a body good.

Closeup of that bed:  self-sown mache, Brune d’Hiver lettuce, and curly endive (frisee)

9 of 12 beds in the “new” greenhouse:  I took the rowcovers off to show you

It’s technically still the beginning of winter for us, and the days and nights will continue to get colder, but there’s a little more sun shining every day.  The greenhouses, however, are still productive.  My challenge?  Pick things fast enough to use things up, but slow enough to allow the lettuces to continue to grow.  This harvesting remains a challenge because I am picking for my family…and four others!  (Everyone in the CSA gets a gallon-sized bag a week.  And we eat what we want, which is probably more like 2-1/2 gallons.)

“Old” greenhouse, looking at 8 of 9 beds:  empty beds have garlic in them

This has been a fairly typical winter for us.  “Typical” includes the 50-degree day of torrential rain we had on New Year’s Eve which thawed every flake of the 8″ of snow on the ground, as well as the regular weather ups and downs…if anything, I would say it’s been cloudier than usual.  Heh.  Climate change = change, all right.  At least the greenhouses nip off the extremes and we’re just left with “winter” in there.

This is a typical mixed bed:  3′x6′, cabbage, kales, lettuce

Trouble?

The lettuces are happy for the most part, snug in their beds.  I do experience the occasional die-off of a plant.  Notice these two in the picture above.  The center has not died on the plants, but the outer, lower leaves have.  It’s been my experience to just leave it and it might recover.  Only when it’s totally mush does it go into the compost.

I can pack things into the beds pretty well too, including things that hate being crowded like these cabbages.  I harvest the outer leaves (that also keeps the growth down) to give to the bunnies…and then occasionally I will eat a whole head.

Hope springs eternal

And those “empty” beds that you saw?  They’re also riddled with seedling lettuces.  Seedling weeds too!  But yeah, lettuces and onions can tolerate really low temperatures and still germinate.  It will just take them a loooonnnng time.

Mulched, and frosty:  the back gardens

Autumn and winter did a rather jumbled waltz this year (two steps forward, three back, two forward, one back, etc.) and honestly for this gardener my head spun, such were the extent of the wild swings.  Now that we’ve hit a cold snap that appears to have stuck, I admit to wishing the unthinkable:  bring on the snow.  Now that the ground has frozen what’s the use of pretending it isn’t?  Winter! Please come!

Dried beans above and fresh veg below, under cover, 8:30 a.m.  It’s 28*F outside and 51*F in.

Now is the time, too, that the greenhouse beds are covered with their blanket of Reemay (agricultural cloth).  The stuff shrunk in the wash this year, alas; I need to purchase more and either sew another three feet to its ends or drape smaller pieces over the 6′x3′ beds.  Having the beds completely covered, incidentally, is not do-or-die; rather, a fully tented structure should (in principle) retain warmth longer, but it still won’t prevent the nightly freeze to its contents.

Poking out of a now too-short length of cloth, Pac choy, flowering.  One little nip of frost followed by some warm weather causes it to bolt.  Fortunately, it still tastes just wonderful…especially in kimchi.

It’s a good thing we don’t eat salad in the early a.m.  It would be nearly impossible to harvest it then, while frozen.  The heat of the day brings the lettuces “back to life,” and this in itself is a daily moment of wonder.  By supper they’re perky and gorgeous.

But it’s not all salad in the greenhouse beds.   Kales and cabbages hog a lot of space too.  Endive and escarole and radicchio (chickories one and all) span the is-it-salad or is-it-dinner bridge (and I love gratinee’d chickory).  Carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips are grown both indoors and out but somehow are a lot easier to harvest in the greenhouses.  And leeks (perennial and annual), bunching onions, bunching scallions and perennialized garlic (a chive substitute:  unlike chives, the close-planted bulbs’ greens don’t winter-kill) make dinners and salads nice and savory.  Parsley, celery, chervil, cilantro, winter savory, thyme, sage and rosemary add some zest.  And sorrel.  Sorrel deserves a post of its own.

The 80* new greenhouse at 3:00 complete with lettuce eater

This post is to simply demonstrate that, for me, gardening (and in particular harvesting) is a year-round endeavor, and I love it.

The right side rolls up, allowing more ventilation in the summer.  The ends are open and will get plastic once it gets cold.

Finally:  I got the plastic up on my mom’s greenhouse recently.

I am beginning to question my sanity in late winter.  Really.  It’s usually in March that I crazily, stupidly commit to all sorts of extracurricular projects, of which my mother’s new greenhouse was but one.  Granted of all of them this one taskoid took the least of my time but it hung the heaviest as my mother lives 50 miles away…so it’s not a quick trip to go fix things up for her.  Plus, it’s for my mother, and I said I would do it.

It didn’t help that the greenhouse company shipped us the wrong size of plastic.  Oops.  That was one wasted day.

Drapery, this time with the correct size

Anyway, here it is.  She’s a bit of a fool for tomatoes so we have them fairly crowded in there.  The soil is topsoil carted in from down the road that’s heavily mixed with mushroom compost.  (This is sand we’re building on, after all.)

Using those dipped gloves (clean AND new) really helps get a grip.  This is the hold-down system for the plastic.  It’s a small channel screwed to the two middle hoops into which I fasten this “wiggle wire.”  It helps to have two people do this:  one pulls the plastic, the other wrangling the wire.  But I did it solo, so…  And the two ends have a sandwich of two 1×2 furring strips.  These were left to soak in a tarp for a few days (the better to bend and hold their shape) then I tapped the bottom strips to accept the metal-tapping screws.  The plastic gets stapled to it, the top strips then screwed to the bottom one with wood screws.  Voila.  The top one can be unscrewed then to accept the side plastic this fall.

The deer are voracious and bold here too so I put chicken wire over the two open ends and the area below the roll-up side.  The ends and side will be open until the nights begin to go frosty.  We hope to take down one towering but rather anemic-looking oak in the side yard to give her a lot more sun.

Ta-daaa!  One more thing struck off the list.

The base frame:  2x8s.  The skinny bed is the path.

It’s going to take a couple of posts, but I wanted to show you the process of building a greenhouse (hoophouse, polytunnel, etc.) for my mom.  It’s a 10′x12′ complete kit from Growers’ Solution.  We’re doing two major beds in it with one long path down the middle (30″ wide x 12′ long).  This means the beds themselves are fairly deep at 3′-6″.  She understands that weeding will be, literally, a stretch, but she’s not concerned.  She’ll have 84 square feet of space under plastic to grow things, so, what’s a little stretching?

On the fated day, Easter,  that our daughter went into the hospital, I was playing Mother of the Year by actually building my own mother’s greenhouse’s base frame.  (I suppose that makes me Daughter of the Year.)  I used untreated 2×8 members:  short side (where the door is) are 10′ long, long sides and inner beds 12′.  They’re held together with galvanized lag screws with washers that are 3″ x 1/4″.  We assembled it on a flat surface (the driveway) then picked it up and moved it to where my mom wants it.  It wasn’t heavy; two people can lift it easily.

My mom and brother have removed all the grass in the beds.  As a precaution against all the moles tunneling in her sandy soil, they are going to bury some aluminum valley flashing (basically, thin metal) around the inside edges of the beds themselves so the little creatures cannot tunnel in.  It will go down about 6″ below the soil line.

Necessary tool:  hammer drill.  Self-tapping metal screws.  These are the tops of the hoops:  the ends fit into each other.  I put 4 screws in per connection.

Tonight after work I will hammer in the ground posts (galvanized steel tubes that are 2″ in diameter, 30″ long), level them, then put together then assemble the hoop frames.  I will likewise screw the hoops together on a level surface; it’s important to not have things too wonky.  These hoops will go into the ground posts and get screwed into them with metal-tapping galvanized screws.  This hoophouse is so small it only requires a center purlin; hopefully we’ll get that assembled and attached down the center too.

My brother hammers in the posts:  that’s a big bolt and washer they ship to hammer it in.  He’s using a 4 lb mallet.  Then we checked the level between the front and back with a line level.

I always fall down on the photo-taking.  Here we’ve erected the hoops and screwed them into the base poles.  We leveled the hoops by connecting the top purlin to the front and back hoops, made it level, fastened those hoops to their posts then leveled and connected the middle two.

And here’s a shot of how the base frame is connected and how the hoop is connected to the base poles.  I will connect the poles to the base by conduit (C-shaped) clamps.

And here’s the 1 1/2″ c-shaped conduit clamp:  never be afraid to pound something into the shape you need!  This is how I got it to fit in the corner.  I then tapped it back into the base pole.

Tomorrow morning I hope to erect the end walls. These are made of 2x4s; I intend to frame the door at one end and just a simple frame at the other.  (See the post below this one to see my own greenhouse’s end wall.)  The plastic will have to wait until another day!   Mom needs to get the topsoil/compost in place, and woodchips down the center aisle.  Then, it’s planting time.

Here’s another example of hammering something out to suit your needs.  This is a joist hanger/strap anchor.  I wrapped it up and over the top of this 2×4.  That’s the top of the greenhouse, top of the hoop you’re seeing.  I chamfered/birdmouthed the top of the 2×4 to accept the hoop.

And here’s something I didn’t have to monkey with:  it’s the top straps that hold the purlin (straight, horizontal pole) to the curved hoops.

And here’s our lovely ladder model showing the finished end walls.  All this work took only, what, 6 hours of my time!

Early March outside in SW Michigan, late April inside the greenhouses:  once the outdoor temps stay above +35F I will need to vent them during the day

It’s not all goatsgoatsgoats here all the time, though I have to admit that, like starting anything new, there’s quite a learning curve.  Every day I shave time off the milking routine, every day I have more time to shave!  The kids were born at a good time for me to learn, and improve:  it’s getting to be serious gardening season here, and I don’t want to miss too many windows of vegetative opportunity.

Water, water everywhere:  perennial condensation on the inside of the greenhouse plastic

We’re not hurting for water here in my corner of the globe.  Combine normal wet conditions, a shallow water table and clay soil, I hardly ever need to water either outdoors or indoors.  I have notions of hooking up a proper water catchment system one day; it’s fairly low on the priority list, though.  However, at this time of the year with these baking indoor temperatures, I do find the atmospheric moisture is not enough, especially with small seedlings.  Anything with root systems shallower than 5″ will be toast.

The platoon says “we could use more snow in here.”  Oh, and my arugula (behind, right)  is blooming, a sure sign that it’s getting too hot indoors.

So, I resort to my usual hee-haw method of water saving:  melting snow in buckets.  I also recycle the goat’s drinking water.  And, I am quite adept at catching the melting runoff from the gutters of the adjacent buildings.  For all the above, I employ my army of 5-gallon used paint buckets.  I am able to spread around about 10-15 gallons a day on the greenhouse beds if it’s sunny and hot.  It’s a pleasant task during my lunchtime “t-shirt light therapy” sessions!

10 of 12 beds in the “new” greenhouse:  all empty-looking beds have either seedlings, unsprouted seeds, or garlic in them.  Some nights I forget to put the covers back on, but everyone comes through okay the next day.

Trying to *find* reasons to stick around the sunny 85-degree greenhouse this weekend, I espied this leek throwing out little leeklets around its base.  Aha!  I thought.  Time to get a leg up on the new Leek Season.

Not all leeks put out these pearls.  In point of fact, I probably wouldn’t save the seed of one that does…these botanical diversions aren’t terribly welcome if single thick stalks are your gardening goal.  But as you can see the mother stalk is just fine, size-wise.  Mom was growing in a bed of mixed leeks and shallots:  shallots do divide, so I assumed that ground greenery was simply a shallot.  And I would have missed these altogether if I hadn’t decided that my time in the new greenhouse needed to be productive time.  Little Edie was just lying around in the sun, why shouldn’t I?

Why did you wake me up?  Put that camera away!

So I carefully teased the leeklets out of the clayey root ball.  Any roots that got broken got a leaf haircut too (balance being key:  you don’t want the plant to blow itself out supporting those heavy leaves on few roots and vice-versa) and I planted them 2″ apart in two rows.

Okay, that took 10 minutes.  Now what else can I do in here?

Garlic shoot, Freckles romaine seedlings

Another fun thing about growing in an enclosed space like a greenhouse?  The weeds that show up are most likely something YOU introduced.  Like these lettuces we found this weekend!   Two feet of snow outside, nice greenery inside.

“Eat your weeds.”

“New” greenhouse on a chilly but sunny morning; that’s snow outdoors and on the plastic.  I removed the covers to show you the growth. Sorry about the drunken, pre-coffee angle.

Thankfully, gratefully, I report a gentle fall to round out the growing year of 2009.  Though our weather this growing season wasn’t as calamitous as many experienced it, it was an unusual year, definitely on the cool side.

Many people don’t realize it, but late spring and late fall are times of moderation, as far as temperatures go:  the swing on our thermometer only changes 20* or so between daytime highs/nighttime lows.  Inside the greenhouse, things are more moderate, too, with a 40* swing found on a sunny day, 20-30* on a cloudy one.  The temperatures slowly drop, but the highs drop too, so now we’re still seeing that swing but it’s happening between cold and colder, not cool and cooler.

This hasn’t always been the case.  Often, November hits us with a bang, and we’ve even  been known to have snow accumulation in mid-October.  Finally, in late November, it got cold.  And I got the Reemay out.

Reemay fabric covers, which stay on until mid-Feb. for warmth.  I always think of Madeline when I see these little beds (there are 12 in the new greenhouse, in two straight lines…

Lettuces fairly well packed into a bed:  notice how they’re not full sized.  I transfered them in as tiny plants in late October.  They’ll grow very slowly throughout the winter, but I’ve made sure there’s enough growth to 1. have a decent harvest and 2.  keep the lettuces smaller to avoid too much frost damage

I invested a mere $20 for 1/2″ PVC sun-resistant conduit to use as the Reemay supports this year.  #9 wire (9/16″ diameter) is recommended:  it’s easily bent, can be stuck in the ground with ease, and the rowcover fabric can easily be clipped to stay in place with clothespins.  But I couldn’t find it at a price I was willing to pay, so the conduit will do just fine…plus, I can reuse it on outdoor beds if I ever do find cheap wire.  Fastening the fabric to the hoops helps the fabric from bellying downward under the weight of frozen condensation.  In the greenhouse, see, there’s no chance of wind blowing the fabric off, but the fabric does get damp.  It can therefore freeze to your lettuces, poor babies.  But:  bow it will.  And as long as you aren’t expecting salad for breakfast, that’s fine.

Wee bit of frost during first light of day:  this Romaine will be fine

This second covering of the veggies adds another 10* or so of temperature moderation.  If the outdoor air hits 30*, the indoor air will be 40*, but below the rowcovers, it might stay at 50* overnight.  A string of cloudy days will drop everyone’s temperature, yet it will still be warmer under the covers.

Winter’s here, though.  Daytime sunny highs hit 80* in the greenhouses while it’s 35* outside; nighttime lows in the low 20s outdoors…but not even 30* in.  I’ll take it!

Fall has come a bit early this year.  Considering how cold it has been all year, the arrival of a cold autumn wasn’t too much of a switch.  Seriously:  I took neither the feather bed nor the down comforter off the bed all summer.  And:  I swam in our (unheated) pool only twice, in Lake Michigan once.  So, heck!  Bring on the killing frost, three weeks early: who cares?

I guess *I* care.  I mean, everyone loves a nice, crisp autumn day, right?  Pretty turning leaves, the smells, the sights, the harvests.  I do feel we were kind of shorted a summer, though.  Can I complain just a little bit about that?  That we didn’t even get above 90* here, and barely got into the 80s at all?  And now we seem to be bypassing autumn too!!

Old greenhouse, toward the front

Sigh.  The only thing that’s happened that has made me this crabby is that I have closed up the greenhouses.  This one task, above all others, means the outdoor growing season is kaput.  Finito, done, signed off, gone!  Now the greenhouses are buttoned up for winter, and their beds are planted…excepting garlic.   I plant garlic very late as it gets big too fast in the 80-90* greenhouse days.

Wait a second:  Summer’s still here, it’s just moved indoors!!

Rather spare-looking new greenhouse.  The plants are just small, thus hard to see.

Ladder in use!  Bags of drying beans and, gah, another winter squash.  Note how I haven’t fully enclosed the top of that side wall.  Still need some ventilation.

Baby lettuces, typical bed.

Chive blossoms

On Saturday I pulled  a monster (4.5″ diameter) leek out of the greenhouse for dinner, and a friend says, my gosh, what did you do to that thing?  Nothing much, just the coddled life in the greenhouse.  So, she said, they’re like the Kobe beef of the vegetable world.  Oh yeah, I say:  I massage my leeks with sake daily.

She was on to something, though.  In point of fact, those greenhouses of ours are taking some getting used to, like all good tools.  My garden and food-preservation life has also needed to adjust.  With effort (mostly in the form of forethought), I will need to do a LOT less canning and freezing this year.  This, incidentally, is not the best news if I consider how much time was spent and how much food was preserved last year.  Well, it’s still good news; it’s just quite a bit of an adjustment.

So, I have had these greenhouses (hoophouses, polytunnels) for a year and a half now.  This is therefore my second spring with them and I now have my first full year of harvesting under my belt.  Like any beginning gardener, I am completely learning, completely figuring out how to manage (in reality, I’m flying by the seat of my pants).  But here it is, early May, and we definitely have had a salad for nearly every dinner for the last year.  We cleaned out the rest of last autumn’s veggies from the greenhouses within the last month.  And recently, we’ve been able to pull new (planted since Feb.) vegetables out of the greenhouses and gardens:  Asian veggies and brassicas mostly, like pak choy and broccoli and napa cabbage, as well as asparagus from outdoors.

This is great!  Preferring fresh produce whenever possible, I can really plan on doing a lot less canning and freezing over the summer.  Yes indeed I will still be chained to the stove for fruit and tomato season, and I’ll still freeze some green beans; for the most part, though, the garden and greenhouse contents need to adjust.  Less cabbage in the root cellar, less sauerkraut, time the fall and winter plantings to add more root crops, stage the production of staples like parsley, carrots, onions, and celery.

It also means I don’t need 70 tomato plants  again.  But the leeks?  Oh yeah:  about 100!