Jan Cooper wrote:For those who want a greenhouse, I saw a FREE potting shed. With a lot of friends AND RENTING A CAR TRAILER, we rolled it onto the trailer and up onto our property, then added windows on one side. A whole walls of windows, for very little, we have an 8 foot and 8 foot high of growing space for starting vegetables, with shelves and growing fluorescents.
Sweet score!
I myself was desperate this spring for a space to start seeds. I only have about two linear feet of sunny windowsill space available in my current living situation, and literally no money to spend on even the cheapest greenhouse solutions.
So I built a single-season temporary seed-starting greenhouse out of literally sticks and string and plastic sheeting and stuff on hand. Six thin-walled steel pipes (left over from a defunct above-ground swimming pool frame) driven into the ground, a ten-foot sapling from my woods in each one, curve the tops over and tie together with string, more saplings tied on as triangle bracing, whole thing covered with a single 10x25 piece of plastic sheeting ($8.00 at Walmart but I happened to have one), stapled on with an Arrow T-50 stapler stapling through little cut squares of glossy (hence slower to dissolve in rain) cardboard salvaged from product packaging. Old pieces of swimming pool vinyl on the floor to keep weeds from filling it, stack of salvaged pallets for a table/bench inside, dozens and dozens of bottles of water from 1-liter to 2-gallon stuffed inside the pallets to provide thermal mass.
It's ugly and it's been far from perfect and I have indeed lost a few of the most tender seedlings on cold nights. Plus the whole thing is a gamble in our Oklahoma wind conditions, I figure it's about even money whether it will survive through the spring storm season without catching a wind too strong that carries it all away. But it's bright and I can stand up inside and it's wind-protected and humid and much warmer than the outside air, and I have many happy seedlings going. It uses way too many plastics and it's way too disposable for any sort of sustainability, but given that all the plastics are recycled and repurposed, I don't feel too bad about it.