Finally, My Greenhouse!

About 2 years ago my sweet mother-in-law Dixie bought me a greenhouse kit for my birthday. I was so excited! I've always wanted one. But, with homeschooling 5 kids, babysitting 2 more, and being immobilized by anemia, (not to mention, again, my inability to follow through with things), I didn't get around to setting it up till last month.
I picked a spot to the right of my little garden and ran a waterline from the garden spigot to the front left corner of where I wanted the greenhouse to be. I pulled weeds and dug up the big clumps of grass so that the greenhouse would be level and weed-free. Then I took a pic. My lovely daughter Abi is in there to give an idea of the size of things.











Then I opened the box and got a little overwhelmed. This thing was going to be bigger than I thought. Luckily I like building things and can read directions. Normally I don't read directions when I build things, then halfway through I'll wish I had, but I wasn't going to take any chances with this baby!










So up it went! It took me half a day to get the entire frame set up (for the love of God and the well being of your wrists, use a drill if you have one!). But then it started to rain, so I abandoned the thing for a week until the rain stopped. Then it took me another half of a day to get the polyethylene (?) sheet in place and secure it down.

















Then I set up the misting system. This didn't come wit the greenhouse kit, I had to go buy all the parts at Lowe's and figure out how to put it all together myself. Before you start thinking I'm really smart, you must know that this was SUPER easy! Not a lot of brain power was involved. First I screwed the timer onto the spigot, then screwed the hose onto the timer.

















Then I ran the hose up the left corner then horizontally along the 3 sides of the frame, and down again at the front right corner to lay in a coil under the shelf. I secured the hose to the frame with plastic zip ties. Again, easy.













The only hard part about this was to figure out what nozzle heads I wanted to use. A drip head would just run down the walls, so I found a mister head that would spray outwards to cover an area of about 2 feet and used the handy little hole puncher to punch holes where I wanted them, allowing for a few inches of spray overlap to make sure all the soil would get coverage. (This was all trial and error, it's a good thing the hole puncher came with plugs to plug up mistake holes!)
















Then I popped the mister heads into the holes, set the timer to spray every once in a while, and voila! I don't have to worry about my seedlings drying out!









The last part of this whole process was laying some sort of flooring. I wanted something that would drain water well and suppress weeds. Most of all though it had to be cheap. My ideal would have been putting the whole greenhouse on a brick foundation, but I didn't have the money for that kind of thing. My next idea was throwing down a layer of those pretty white round pebbles, but that would have been too expensive as well. So my last resort was using the box our new T.V. came in (thank you Grammie and Grumpy!), which worked great because I really didn't want our neighborhood tweakers to know we have a nice new T.V. So I put down a layer of cardboard, then a couple inches of bark mulch on top which was about $5 a bag, I used about 4 or 5 bags. I could have used homemade mulch with my chipper/shredder, but I didn't have it up and running yet, and I didn't have the time with our vacation decending upon us quickly and a wedding dress to finish! Eventually the cardboard will rot away, then I'll put down more mulch. I'll use the chipper then.

















So after a giant exhausted sigh, and warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment, I was finally able to plant my seeds secure in the thought that they would stay warm and moist while I was away from them. The End! (Tune in next time for my exciting soil experiment! Well, exciting to me anyway!)