Greenhouse

One of the biggest projects that we've had on our home wish list has been a greenhouse. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone. As excited as I am to have a winter garden, and as thankful as I am that I can garden year-round here, it's still an imperfect solution. For one thing, while my garden is beautifully sunny for 3/4 of the year it lies half in shade during the winter. Cloudy days actually help a little, because they diffuse the light so the shadows aren't as bad. However...then it's cloudy. When the weather gets cold the plants also grow sloooooooooooowly, if at all. Spinach over-winters but puts out maybe one new leaf a week when it's both cold and dark. To make even one salad over the winter I would need a whole row dedicated to salad greens. Many plants do better--kale and chard grow beautifully throughout the winter--but growing enough for a family to eat their fill takes a lot of space, and it would require a lot of coordination at the beginning of spring and end of summer to plant new seedlings. End of summer is particularly problematic because that's when I'm also busy canning and preserving, harvesting, planning the best uses for all of our produce so none of it goes to waste. And those are just the garden chores, on top of regular life with two young children.

I also wanted a dedicated space for seed starting in spring. In the past my tiny seedlings have been kept in either the dark of our storage space downstairs, under grow lights, which didn't produce the strongest seedlings, or in the kitchen, where they grew leggy, toward the big sliding door where the light came from. Both years they were knocked over by my younger child, so I ended up with only half the seedlings I wanted and had no idea what they were until much farther in their maturity. It turns out that all tomato varieties look the same, as do peppers, and brassicas all start out looking the same. It would have been helpful last spring to re-plant my cherry tomatoes if I'd known that all of them were toddler casualties. Or, you know, to just not have toddler casualties from the start.

Last, we have a problem of storage space on our property. We have a shed, but it's both non-optimal and clearly needs a re-do. The roof is looking poorly and even I can see that there are rotten boards. We've been meaning to re-do it since we bought the house but, well, it's on the list. We use it for storage of the larger tools, but the smaller tools haven't had a great place to live. We store them in boxes under the stairs but, again, that's been labeled "temporary" storage as we'd prefer to house things like the grill under there instead.

So, a greenhouse. This was no small undertaking and I'm practically worthless when it comes to planning out woodworking projects that are more than "saw and then hammer or drill". HusbandX was more confident of the actual work but when it came to planning he wanted his dad's help. My father-in-law is, after a lifetime of working on these kinds of things, a bit of a genius when it comes to making the maximum use of space while being efficient with materials. My in-laws were also missing both their sons and granddaughters, so we arranged to have a long visit with them while COVID cases were relatively low in both of our states. They came for a whole month, which was both wonderful and slightly crazy. My brother moved back from New York the week after they arrived, so for over four weeks we had a household of 8. Lots of help, but also a lot more to do and a lot more people to keep track of.

My father-in-law brought along a book called "The Solar Greenhouse", and the pictures were pretty much exactly what I'd been imagining. Instead of a plastic covered frame, more like a high tunnel, this book is about wood-framed glass greenhouses. If we could swing it, if it wouldn't be too expensive, this was what I'd prefer. It would be sturdier, to hold up against the windstorms we frequently get here, and would hopefully be able to hold up even if a branch from one of the trees around us happened to fall on it. It would also, hopefully, be warmer. Maybe?

Tiny helper

The site of the greenhouse was never in question. We have one corner of our yard which has gone mostly unused. When we bought the house whoever did the landscaping had made this raised corner, fronted by jagged boulders, into what was supposed to be a little seating area. Succulents were planted among the boulders and the top was covered in large rounded gravel, with a few pavers as stepping stones. It was meant to be a hangout area, perhaps with a fire pit on it, but it quickly became overgrown by the neighbor's uncontrolled blackberries, ivy, and bindweed. The black plastic under the gravel was no match, to a laughable degree, for the vines. (Side note: please stop using that plastic in your landscaping. It's awful.) We even had a maple tree and a holly that have tried to grow among the boulders. But, this is also the sunniest part of the entire yard. It gets all day sun, comfortably backed by trees but otherwise in the open, well away from the shade of the house or any other structures. Even in the darkest days of the year, this corner of the yard will get the full 8 hours of mostly cloudy daylight that December in Seattle boasts.

The project got off to a bit of a slow start as there was a slight miscommunication to me about urgency as other small house projects were worked on, such as organizing the children's now-shared closet. I wanted to check with a neighbor about some windows that have been leaning against our shared fence since last spring, accumulating bindweed vines and blackberry brambles. And then I took care of other chores and to-do items instead. By the time I got around to it, it was a weekday and apparently our neighbor has a 9-5. I finally, in the evening, knocked and met his (young adult) daughter and exchanged phone numbers. She promised to pass my message along to her dad and give him my number.

After all of that, it was a bust. Apparently he's been letting those windows accumulate dirt and vines because he needs them. Instead, my brother suggested that we go to a local place called Second Use to look for windows. How had I never heard of this place before??!! It's amazing. No surprise by the name, it's a second hand store for building materials and supplies. It had antiques to nearly-new items from toilets and urinals to bricks to lockers. Some high school gym must have gotten a complete overhaul because there were, as I said, lockers and also pine boards from bleachers. Truly authentic, they still had wads of chewed up gum stuck to them. My father-in-law actually looked at those as potential siding but ultimately decided against it. But we found all of our windows there, the concrete blocks we needed, and a few other items. One of them is a metal bike rack for parking, like you see outside of businesses. Building bike parking was also on our to-do list but we saw the rack, slightly bent, realized that all of our "daily ride" bikes, including the children's bikes (6 in total), would fit on it, and it was only $40. SOLD. We could not have built a bike rack for cheaper and it would certainly have taken much longer. We slid that bad boy under the neighbor's giant juniper tree that straddles our fence, an area that is covered by the branches and stays nearly bone-dry no matter how nasty the weather. It's also right by the walkway leading out of the yard, highly convenient, and isn't visible from the street/sidewalk.

We could have bought this
ancient exercise machine from
Second Use. Missed
opportunities.

So, the windows. We got three windows from Second Use, one of which is ENORMOUS. Six feet by seven and a half feet. New, this window easily would have cost us $600-700. Instead it was $125. The other two, much smaller, windows for the side of the greenhouse were not quite as cheap but still a fantastic deal. I think in total we only spent about $300 on the windows.

For the door, we already had that. When we bought our house it had a storm door on the front. The day we moved in, a friend was carrying boxes in for us and the door just fell off. We tucked it around back figuring we'd do something with it at some point, and then it stayed there for 3 years as we did nothing at all with it. It's all glass so I figured it would be a great door for the greenhouse. My father-in-law gamely worked it into his plan, which had to be re-worked several times due to the unknown size of the windows. 

Lumber, on the other hand, was where we spent the big bucks. Apparently the price of lumber is sky-high, due to both increased pandemic demand as people do house projects and likely due to supply disruptions. So I waved goodbye to just over $1000 the day we went to the hardware store and bought all of the lumber and plywood. Had we found used lumber and plywood, or used something like pallet boards, it would have been much cheaper. However, despite looking, we didn't find any of the lumber we needed at Second Use, and all the work of deconstructing and then constructing pallet wood would have taken far, far longer than our actual budgeted time. This one was a time vs. money cost that not even I questioned.

Then came building, which I mostly stayed out of. I swung a hammer a few times, but it was near one of the windows and I was very uncoordinated both because it's been so long since I used a hammer and because of my terror that I'd smash the glass. But also, I was dealing with this:

The boot came after the construction was
done. It was the realization that it
wasn't plantar fasciitis but actually a
stress fracture that I had to deal with,
limping around and finally going to urgent
care because my primary care wouldn't see
me for at least 6 weeks. Whee.

Painting was where I shone and did my major contribution. While the sides and front of the greenhouse were being framed, on the patio, I got busy painting the back wall, which is entirely plywood. Being on the north side and backed by trees it won't take in light so it's more valuable as insulation and providing strength to the entire building. Since it would be backed right up against the fence I painted it before it was moved. Why paint it? For one thing, as weather-proofing. I don't want it rotting out so we have to re-do it in a few years. But also, we want this to look nice even for our neighbors since it abuts our two properties. We painted it green, to which my older daughter said, "Well yeah. It's a GREEN house." So I had to explain to her why a greenhouse is not just a green house. I remember my mother having the same conversation with me when I was young, so that was a fun circle to make.

The kids helped me paint that big back wall, brushing paint on in old t-shirts of mine while I went over it all with the roller, and then with a brush to cover up any divots. When it came to the trim, however, I did that on my own. Sawhorses on the grass, I worked on that for a couple of hours one afternoon, until the light was almost gone and my toes had gone numb with the cold, my hands frozen into claws. There were still a few pieces of trim to paint the next day, as well as various other patches to make.

The final piece of the greenhouse was that we wanted a rain barrel. I wanted to kick myself because I'd seen two at Second Use the first day we were there, but they were snagged by someone else within ten minutes of me noticing them, when we were deep in conversation about windows. They were plastic anyway, and I was hoping for (but not holding my breath for) metal rain barrels. Seattle has a program called Rain Wise, and we live in an area that's important to the watershed and salmon, so we would get reimbursed for rain catchment systems. However, we would have to go through a contractor for that and for such a small project I really didn't want to hire it out, even if it would mostly get reimbursed. I looked at metal rain barrels and they're expensive. Really expensive. I looked at eBay for steel drums and discovered that they sell for well over $100. Okay. Just for giggles, I checked Craigslist. Someone was selling food safe steel drums for $20 each. The dimensions of the barrels were given in the ad, and after making arrangements to pick them up I measured and re-measured the back of our car to ensure they'd fit. My husband grumbled that I'd never fit two of them in our small hatchback, possibly not even one of them let alone two, so I was quite gleeful when I got to text him a picture of the barrels snuggled into the back of our car, the back seat folded down.

Steel drums in the back of our Subie.
Look at all that extra space!

The rain barrels will help in two ways. First, they will reduce the water bill that inevitably comes with a city garden. But second, and just as important, it will save me a lot of labor. The greenhouse is on the far corner of the yard from the house, and farthest away from the corner where the water spigot is. Our hose doesn't reach all the way to the greenhouse, so I would have to be running back and forth with a watering can or a bucket, or both. Ugh. I don't mind the hard work and labor of gardening, in fact I enjoy it, but when I can save myself time doing something unnecessary I am all over that.

The last part of putting up the greenhouse is a bit of a blur to me, running back and forth as I was between working on that and taking care of other things inside the house, like laundry and cooking for 8 people. (The kids, thankfully, were basically passed into my mother-in-law's capable hands for everything from school to playing games and going for walks.) I changed into and out of my painting clothes at least three times one day as I went out to paint a bit of trim that had been cut to fit in a different way or do some other dirty work.

The roof of the greenhouse is sloped down to catch the most light and warmth, as well as the rain. We used clear corrugated plastic for it because it's cheap and reasonably sturdy. There are bits of foam shaped to the corrugation that can be purchased cheaply so that there aren't gaps between the roofing and the frame. It's not even close to air-tight, but it will provide a decent amount of weather-proofing. I'm still anxiously waiting to see how warm it gets and stays in different conditions. On sunny days it warmed up to over 100 degrees. On cloudy days, however, it's only been about 10 degrees above the outside temperature. At night it's been roughly the ambient temperature. I really want to see what the lows get to when it's frosty outside in the depths of winter. This doesn't matter so much for the hardy greens and root vegetables I'll be growing in there this winter but it will factor into what plants can be overwintered in it. Right now we have peppers, but that's just to ripen the last of them. I've scattered seeds in my pepper pots so that when they're done I'll start getting a new crop--of napa cabbage and beets.

We're trying to figure out the best way of climate hacking the greenhouse with thermal sinks. We talked about putting the rain barrel inside the greenhouse but decided that we'd just end up with a flooded greenhouse all winter and rot the floor out. We have a couple of extra cement blocks in there right now, but it's unclear yet how much difference (if any) they'll make when it's cloudy and cold. We also have a bucket full of water and the watering can is kept full in there to absorb any heat from the day and release it at night. Thermal mass will help to even out the temperature all year, preventing it from overheating too much in summer, keeping it warm at night, and holding onto some heat in winter. (Hopefully.) In summer I can open any or all of the windows and prop the door open if it gets too hot. My father-in-law also wired it for electricity, which we can provide with an all-weather extension cord from the house, so if we want to run a small heater or fan in there we can. Electricity also means that I can use my grow lights out there when I start plants in the spring.

All up and running, new seeds
planted for winter.

It's still not quite finished. We need to figure out the best way to store tools, and get a basket for gardening gloves. The plants are on an industrial rack--the kind you see in commercial kitchens--by the front window, also acquired from Second Use. But we might want to put another workbench or stand in there as well. We found a slab of granite countertop behind our woodshed, which would both make a great top for a table and a heat sink. So maybe that's on the project list sometime? Last, the racks are open, so my pots--which don't have anything to catch water--can just leak onto the floor. I need to figure that out. I know there are rubbery plastic mats that can be acquired that fit on those racks because I saw some at Second Use (for a smaller rack). Maybe the answer is simpler, however, just getting water catchment for the bottom pots, the largest ones. When I started seeds the other day (napa cabbage, beets, spinach, lettuce, and a green called tatsoi) I positioned the smaller pots above the large ones, so that as the water leaked out it watered the plants/seeds below. It's not perfect, but at least in the short term it will do.

We still have a bit of other work to do, such as sinking some decorative pavers I got for free from my Buy Nothing group to make a more stable platform before stepping into the greenhouse. And we will definitely want to hook up the second rain barrel to the first, which is already filling up quickly with even the fairly light rain we've had. (And even with two, we'll be getting overflow all winter.) But it's up, and it's beautiful, and I'm so happy.