Twisted and Delusional

I’ve been wanting a greenhouse in the back yard for a while now. Two reasons in my thinking it would be good, number one is that I can get a lot of the plants currently growing on various surfaces all around the house off of those surfaces, and two I  would be extending my growing seasons by starting sprouts outdoors. Thus, when I saw Harbor Freight had their 6′ by 8′ greenhouse on sale and I had a 25% off coupon…… temptation won out.  I already had a spot picked out for it, the weed patch in the corner that used to be the best pepper plant area I had until the neighborhood cats decided to make it the community toilet. I removed the cat problem a couple years ago, but I just couldn’t bring myself to recondition the beds and plant there again. Here is a pic of the weed patch that will be the new greenhouse area.

I leafed through the instructions (which weren’t in horrible chinglish, but actually readable) and decided on a foundation type for my greenhouse. Of the three possible foundation types presented, I went with wood in case I finally found property I couldnt live without and need to move. So off to Lowes for a little lumber. The sizes of lumber  needed were large so I knew it wasnt going to be cheap, but damn! I wouldnt even mind the prices so much if the lumber was even kinda straight and didnt weight a ton cause its still wet. Oh well, back to the project.

Once I got the lumber home I cut the pieces for the base and half-ass laid them out to get an idea of how much space it would be and where I wanted it located. Of course I took a pic of the layout for reference, so I will let you see too.

Nice, I like it. Enough room to get around it and maintain the weed population, but close enough to the fence to keep my ‘lawn’ area pretty much intact. Now to the un-fun part, scraping the ground to give the foundation a solid base and make it easier to level the frame.

Once that was done I put the rest of the lumber down to make up the base, used metal brackets to  hold everything together and scrape the weeds off the ground so I can put the weed barrier down inside the greenhouse. Overall the foundation is pretty heavy and by the time I load it full of rock gravel its not going anywhere.

Time to open the box and start putting the greenhouse together! The parts came packaged pretty nicely but there was still some damage to the components. While thats not much of a problem for me since I can straighten just about anything, it may be a problem for those who have no clue how to convince metal to play nicely. The panels that go in the greenhouse weren’t what I expected. I was thinking solid 1/8″ thick panes of acrylic, I was pleasantly surprised by clear plastic corrugated panels. I really like them because the are light, tough, and have about 1/4″ of air insulation space. That means better heat retention in my greenhouse and that makes me happy. Box contents shown below…

I started grabbing the parts listed and assembling per the instructions (yes, I will use them if they are readable) and about the fifth step in decided that you have to have two people minimum to do it according to instruction. No prob, time to do it my way. Lol. The instructions would have you make a very unstable half of the greenhouse and have someone hold it all in place while you run around attaching things to a partial frame. No go for someone doing this whole project solo. So I built the least stable version that would hold itself upright and went from there. It had a bit of a lean, but it stood up and allowed me to keep building so I consider it a win. It looked kinda like this at that point.

No, thats not camera angle, its really leaning like that. There were still a lot of aluminum pieces lying around and hardware left at this point. Speaking of the hardware, I had to keep reminding myself I got this at Harbor Freight, on sale, and with a discount. The bolts and nuts werent the best threaded specimens I’ve ever used. They work, but some of them were resistant to starting and threading properly. There wasnt a single bolt or anything left over, you have to use what is given and hope they counted right. Anyway, lots of bolts and aluminum later I got the structure finished complete with sliding door and two upper windows installed and working.

At this point it was hot, I’d been sweating for too long, it was getting in my eyes, and I just didnt want to be in the sun anymore. So I went in the house, turned on the fan, turned on the xbox and gamed until late into the night. I will update this when I put all the panels in place and load the gravel in the base. That means taking the shell out of the truck bed to get gravel…..  (groan).

I love to grow things, every year I have a garden with  some of my favorite things planted. This year I didn’t go overboard like I usually do mostly cause of personal BS I was dealing with, took me a bit to get out of the funk and get on with stuff. On the bright side, my plants dont seem to care and are doing good. The bell peppers are already well on their way to producing some good peppers for me.

I plant in raised beds for the ease of working and keeping the soil in shape. The ground here where I live in Central California can be hard and difficult to work with at times. Plus its easy to take the weed whacker and trim up around the outside of boxes and not risk damaging the things I want to grow. I dont get all anal with keeping every weed and blade of grass out of the planter boxes. The garden plants seem to do better if I leave some low grasses and other weeds in the beds. Its my opinion that it helps to hold some moisture in the soil instead of baking the first two inches of dirt in the California sun. I’ve also learned to leave my lawn a bit long and shaggy to keep the moisture in, for a lot of years I trimmed it short and it would dry out and die in big patches. Not good.

I also like letting things go to seed. I take the biggest and best producers and let them seed out since those plants appear to like the soil and weather conditions best in my planting beds. The idea is next year there will be a whole crop of really good producers selected to best agree with my gardens conditions. Well, thats the plan at least…..   So, in that vein heres a pic of my carrots going to seed.

Just in case you are wondering, yes they really are that big. Thats a six foot fence behind the carrots that they peek over, the flowers average 4″ in diameter. All of that from some little tiny Nantes carrot seeds I had. I think I might be able to get some seeds from them this year. There is something about this particular planting bed that grows things big. For several years I had an Early Girl tomato that kept reseeding itself and it was a monster every year. The planting bed is 3′ by 8′ and it would take over the whole damn bed, the fence, and anything else around it. This year it didnt reseed so I went with a different tomato, just a cherry tomato plant.

 

 

 

See what I mean, that was a sprout about a month ago and now I’ve got a cherry tomato plant about 4 feet tall and already giving me some nice red tomato. If you look close you will see some big clover leaves in there. I tend to let the clover grow just because I like it. I’m thinking about introducing red clover from the foothill in my garden since I’ve learned that I really like the taste of red clover. I learned that in the Wild Edibles class I need to do a write up on……

Lets move on to another planting bed, the zucchini bed. My mom makes a mean chocolate zucchini bread so I grow as much of it as I can and hope that she will make a ton of that bread. The zucch bed doesnt produce monsters like the other bed does, unless I pant cucumbers, last year one cucumber plant took over the bed, climbed two 8′ poles and drove me nuts. No cucumbers this year, I’m still peaved that the last one choked out all of the butternut squash I planted.

 

 

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how they are doing, I even have one small zucch starting to fatten up. I like watching the flowers on these plants. They are open in the morning waiting on the morning sun and in the evening they are closed up tight for the night. I noticed during the last rain they closed up also, makes me wonder what exactly is the trigger to make them close. Probably one of those things I can google but thats not as much fun as the mystery. Notice I good little Californian and have my plants on drip? LOL. Not. I use drip because I can put water where I want it. I used to use spray heads to water the whole bed and all I got for it was 15 times the weeds and other stuff. Now the weeds and ground cover stay short because the water is directed at my garden plants, win-win.

I grow a bunch of containerized plants too. Every day before I head to work at 6:30 am I go walk through the plants and hand water the potted plants. Its a good way for me to start the day, cathartic, mellows me out so I dont start off running my department looking to bite someones head off. One grouping of my potted plants: bergamot, peppermint, and 3 tea plants.

The tea plants are the type that all teas from green tea to good old Lipton black are made from. The different tea types are made by aging the leaves to different stages. I also have 6 arabica coffee plants and if your lucky maybe I’ll post pics of those in another post about roasting my own coffee……