Building the Greenhouse

The wretched skeleton of the $25 greenhouse, full of weeds and a Fire Ant Metropolis

Many years ago…how many? Hmmmm…..I am thinking five or six? Maybe more? Well ANYWAY, I wanted a GREENHOUSE, and I priced greenhouse kits, where they ship you a box and then you put it together yourself, and they were like OVER A THOUSAND DOLLARS! The really nice ones were over TWO!

Are you as shocked as I was? Because that is really expensive for a crude plexiglass covered structure.

So I decided to see if I would really USE it (you HAVE seen those sad abandoned greenhouse kit greenhouses standing in people’s yards full of cardboard boxes?) and I followed the instructions in “Four Season Harvest” to make their “$25 Greenhouse”. It is made of rebar, covered with PVC pipes, and a big plastic sheet.

In this photo, I have placed my potted trees within the $25 greenhouse

The $25 Greenhouse actually worked G*R*E*AT the very first time I made it! And I found that I DO use it–a LOT. I use it to shelter my potted citrus and Thai Lime-leaf trees from the occasional freeze, to shelter my Aloe Veras ( I have a post coming up about my aloes…called THE BLACK HOLE OF ALOE CALCUTTA!!!!!   DUN DUN DUN!) and to grow delicate seedlings in the spring. It is great. So great that I have been re-making it every winter for $25 and I have never built a permanent one.

Some day I will.

The view into the door of the magnificent completed greenhouse

But for now: I give you—-The Remaking of the $25 greenhouse, 2009!

First, I dragged all the junk out of the Greenhouse skeleton, washed everything, weeded the entire floor, removed the Fire Ant Metropolis with a shovel and a wheelbarrow (I relocated them to a vacant lot. I know, I know, but I felt sorry for them, they had put so much EFFORT into their fancy metropolis. And they thought they were so SAFE hiding under my tarp in my mulch pile!) THEN, I did something entirely N*E*W (for me): I covered the floor with Weed Barrier Cloth and Old Mulch. USUALLY, because it is a great temperature in the greenhouse, damp, and free of lawnmowers, by spring I have quite a lot of weeds and high grass in there. Not this year (maybe)!)

Then Dave and I covered the frame with a new plastic sheet, and stapled it to the frame and weighed the sides down with rocks. (In the original instructions, for VERMONT, it just very unhelpfully says “bury the plastic sheet in the ground and when the ground freezes, it holds the plastic in place like a vise.” Uh-huh.

I don’t think the ground has frozen in Central Texas since , since, the ICE AGE?!?!?! Is that a million years ago? Ten Thousand? Ten thousand sounds right.

ANYWAY

View of Meyer Lemons and Tangerines inside Greenhouse

Seedling table and garden implements

Then, we took off the doors and I re-plasticked them, too. Then re-attached them. And it was done! It DID take ALL FUCKING DAY LONG, but only because 1) the wheels on my dolly were flat and I had to go get them filled, which they VERY KINDLY DID at Discount tire FOR FREE, and 2) I had to go to Home Depot to get transparent Duct Tape, and the high-school age stooges who were supposed to be working there, but who were actually MUCH more interested in popping their gum and gossiping, and who actually thought they were TOO COOL to CARE about their DUMB JOB, wasted 40 minutes of MY TIME staring at me blankly and telling me that Home Depot did not stock it and never had, when ACTUALLY they DO and DID, and looking at me like I was some kind of fat crazy middle-aged psycho when I kept on INSISTING that YES YOU DO CARRY IT. AND I BUY IT HERE EVERY YEAR IN NOVEMBER.

Dry Firewood temporarily stored in the Greenhouse

TO be FAIR, I have worked all my life in customer service until two years ago, and I have had my share of customers INSISTING that we used to sell some item that we have never, ever sold. So I did understand that they just thought I was WRONG. But….I wasn’t wrong, and they couldn’t find their asses with both hands, and they didn’t even LOOK on the computer or LOOK in the store or ask more experienced workers. They just looked at me blankly and denied they had it, when they actually had BOXES AND BOXES FULL.

But for now, I give you: THE COMPLETED GREENHOUSE!

Completed $25 Greenhouse with photogenic Chinaberries