I’ve Finally Got A Greenhouse!

I’ve always dreamed of having a greenhouse to support my organic vegetable garden. But since moving to our new home I’ve constantly been challenged by possums, rats and caterpillars, and hardly harvested any food. That doesn’t even take into account the extreme and unpredictable weather. So, I decided to take control.

The greenhouse locks out the possums and the rats. However, I’m still manually removing caterpillars, and not doing that regularly enough as one tiny creature can decimate seedlings in a few days. I’ve seen that I need to be doing a daily caterpillar hunt.

Current Greenhouse Setup

With a temperature control setup including a fan, and an irrigation system I have a lot more control over the environment. This means plants aren’t drying out on a sudden hot day, and then getting chilled and flooded the next day. I still need to get a tap timer to make the irrigation system automatic, and the seedling waterers need a different fitting. But, I’m making progress and enjoying the journey.

Greenhouse Kit

My husband purchased our greenhouse from Backyard Discovery and it was a great choice for us. We usually design our own constructions and build them ourselves, as it is often more cost effective and I get exactly what I want. However, we are time poor at the moment, so we purchased a flat pack. It was also a good financial choice since it would have cost almost the same to buy all the materials.

We wanted to get this job done, so we got our trusty landscape gardener in to help us meet a deadline. This greenhouse is all about improving my mental health, and our family’s nutrition. So far it hasn’t produced anywhere near enough food to justify the cost. But, the time I’ve spent gardening in here by myself, and with Lara and Livs has been joyous.

It took about three days to level out the foundations, lay the flooring and then construct the greenhouse. Then I hate to admit that I needed a push from Mark to go and get plants to planters to set it up, because I was focused on making everything perfect-consequently nothing was growing and I was just sitting in a beautiful warm room dreaming of a lush greenhouse.

Planting Out The Greenhouse

It was time to adapt the “done is better than perfect” approach. This is something I’m still working on in my 40s, even though I’m always cheering on others to just do things.

I gathered standard and self watering pots from my shed, the local hardware store and a reuse center. Then I started moving in established plants, and sowing seeds in the greenhouse. The germination rate (of viable seeds) has been fabulous. No doubt it would be even better is I had an automatic timer on the irrigation system. I need to put it in my calendar to get to that job tomorrow.

The biggest harvesting success from the greenhouse so far has been the handful of tomatoes that we ate as a family. In the two years that we’ve been living in our new house I haven’t had a ripe tomato from the garden. I’m still a long way off from the backyard farmer that I considered myself to be in my old garden. But finally harvesting a handful of tomatoes from the greenhouse restored my faith in my ability to grow food.

What made that harvest even more of a surprise was that I didn’t get to the greenhouse for a week, and yet nothing had stolen our food.

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