Permies Poll: Do you use a greenhouse?

I marked 'no' but that's a temporary state, not somewhere I landed out of principle. And I used to have a small one but it blew away and was mangled in the tumbling.

I voted "I own one but don't use it" because it's a kit and my husband got the roof on it, today. We still have a week or 2 before I can start to use the thing. No vent at the moment, no door, etc. It's getting there!

I just finally built one this year. I went with a wood frame as it was 1/3 the cost of metal ribs.

Yes.
We first had a plastic tunnel. It blew away in a storm four days after putting it up.
We now have this greenhouse that my hubby built from salvaged windows and I love it!

absolutely - i had two but a hurricane knocked one out.

i use old windows ... can't live without it! i posted more details here:


https://permies.com/t/262587/Making-sustainable-greenhouse-disposable-plastic#2593499

We have had this one for several years now. High quality Poly holds up fine here. This stuff has some UV protection built in.

https://permies.com/t/275796/Skiddable-Greenhouse#2875754

We lost a good deal of our summer planting starts  to late cold weather/frost June 2024.  Bought a supplemental little chineese steel pipe/ripstop poly tunnel for this year. Can be taken down, end of season. Wind snapped the phony tie downs provided with it the day following it's assembly. Rolled it over into the yard, lightly bending one tube.
Reanchored, it has worked well, even with few inches of snow on it first week of May.

Got a decent price on about 800s.f. of SunTuf from my local lumberyard last fall.  Just started cutting the dirt on a greenhouse incorporating the ideas of John Hait in his book 'Passive Annual Heat Storage'. Whole idea inspired by our friends up the road, they have an earth sheltered greenhouse built into a hillside she says does not freeze what she winters over, even at the -30F we get here every year. Lil'B says this is what we will have.
My plan is superficially pretty simple. 6 ft. filled masonry retaining wall, steep, clear glazed front roof to shed snow, insulated back roof, earth tube to help collect/radiate heat. Won't be done this year, have to season building lumber I'll mill from trees cut last winter. Lots of other projects.

No, we don't have a big enough yard.  Maybe someday if we ever can buy a house rather than renting we'll do it, my plan would be to grow things in there we can't grow in our zone, grow zone 9 stuff in there, coffee, bananas, possibly avacados?  A big one which we could leave the door open on so bees go in and pollinate.  But that's all fantasy at this point.

This is my first year growing in a greenhouse/hoop house thingy.
It's a steep learning curve. I did not plan for enough ventilation and need to figure out how to keep the temperature down inside. I have some shade cloth over the top of half of it and that seems to help quite a bit.
I will be getting more of that as the outdoor temps are in the 90's F (mid 30's C) lately.

It looks like this.

Front view

You can see how I built it here: https://permies.com/t/278734/green-hoop-house-thingy-build

Lots of happy plants (when it isn't sweltering inside).

southside bed

northside bed

We have already had some salad stuff, radishes, mizuna, arugula, chicory, spinach, and lettuce out of it.
I have been successfully training the squash beans, peas and melons to grow up and use the cattle panels as a trellis.

We have an attached greenhouse, and I highly recommend it. Because it serves a number of functions beyond being a place to start plants in the spring. It also provides a little heat on sunny winter says, sometimes enough that we don't need a fire on a marginal day. The shelves along the south wall are where I dry things like peanuts, beans, sunflower heads and grains. I also put a towel there after a shower, alternating between two towels. And it serves as a mudroom. It has a stone floor, and on winter mornings, that's where we empty the ash tray from the woodstove into a coal bucket.
It's made with conventional two by four construction, using salvaged tempered glass. We built our house against tall trees on the west side, so it's in shade all summer; It gets urgent to get the seedlings planted out in May as little sunlight gets in that close to the solstice. It has a small openable window on the north side and a vent in the roof, as well as a screen door, so it actually doesn't heat the house in summer. But most of the trees are hickories, which drop hard, sizable nuts, so we can't have a glass roof. But my husband thought of a clever trick to let a little more light in. There is a lower roof under the tin roof and the southernmost part of this inner roof is glass. In winter, with low sun angles, additional sun comes in through there. There are three 50-gallon barrels full of water along the back wall, for thermal mass, with a shelf above them that is in constant use--for example, that's where I cut potatoes to dry before planting and right now it has three buckets of poppy heads, a clipper, my gardening pants which stay outside the house all summer because of chiggers...all in all, I find it so useful I wonder how a serious homesteader can get by without one.

Joshua States wrote:T
It's a steep learning curve. I did not plan for enough ventilation and need to figure out how to keep the temperature down inside. I have some shade cloth over the top of half of it and that seems to help quite a bit.
I will be getting more of that as the outdoor temps are in the 90's F (mid 30's C) lately.

If your nighttime temps aren't below unacceptable you might want to consider taking off both ends entirely and using screen in the hotter months - a larger mesh will let pollinators in as well. your window openings could be larger. At minimum remove the the apex (wedge above the door half-moon shape) on both ends... heat rises and collects there so the "tunnel will at least dissipate - cover in the fall.

i live in a cooler climate than you - i have a shed roof design... from june-sept the high part is permanently vented/open at the top rafters. i close it off during cold months... you could do something similar on the ends.

i have large opening windows on 3 sides that get a breeze - they are now permanently open. in the spring fall - they get opened and closed depending on the inside temp.

on a 25c day with sun and with everything open... it is still close to 35-40 in the greenhouse.

venting is definitely a "thing" ;-)

hope this helps - good luck - cheers!

Joshua States wrote:This is my first year growing in a greenhouse/hoop house thingy.
It's a steep learning curve. I did not plan for enough ventilation and need to figure out how to keep the temperature down inside. I have some shade cloth over the top of half of it and that seems to help quite a bit.
I will be getting more of that as the outdoor temps are in the 90's F (mid 30's C) lately.

Joshua, every spring I grow smaller pumpkins, passionfruit, cucumbers and other summer climbing vines over the whole sides and top of the greenhouse and leave the doors open for pollinators and breezes, it works well to shade the interior and the sun-loving veggies love it as climbing vines always seek sun.

They die back late autumn so admit sun; the doors are closed off in winter, keeping inside warm. I've been doing this over 40 years and it works well for me.

I live in a temperate zone so this would not work as well for those experiencing snow, but frost cloth would be a good option to line the inside with and still admit light.

Ghetto greenhouse here. 10' x 36'

Two of those inexpensive carport frames, 8' fence t posts driven in the ground used as the uprights to slide the roof tubes on to.

4 x 4 fence wire stretched across the top and tensioned/fastened to keep the rainwater running off instead of making a giant water balloon bulging down in the plastic.

Greenhouse plastic can be had inexpensively from ebay.

Salvaged hurricane anchors and truck cargo tie downs, along with having about 2 - 3' of extra plastic at the bottom of each side to bury to keep it from leaving unexpectedly.

Having the edges buried is surprisingly effective. I watched another tent I have (military truck maintenance tent) go through a hurricane with the buried edges being the last thing holding  holding through all that.

The ends are multiple sheets (also provides a curtain door) of greenhouse plastic clamped to the frame with cheap carpenters spring clamps.

It's in a position where my mobile home blocks a lot of the wind.

The ends get removed as soon as it heats up and the shade cloth goes on.

Even so, only things like peppers and okra can stand the heat in there mid summer. It's all over for anything else by the fourth of July.

20 or so black plastic barrels along the walls and filled with water will get it through freezing nights with just a couple small space heaters. It holds around 45 degrees. Not sure if this would work through a prolonged day and night freeze, which we rarely see here in N. FL.

Mostly I grow tomatoes through the winter in a dutch bucket hydroponic setup.
The two best info resources for that have been:

https://extension.msstate.edu/sites/default/files/publications/publications/p1828.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/user/mhpgardener/videos

I wanted a greenhouse for years,  but it wasn't until I encountered Northern Greenhouse and an early fall that I actually built one. My 12'x19' hoop/quonset style is similar to the one made with rebar (https://northerngreenhouse.com/projects-and-ideas/bobs-projects-and-ideas/rebar-greenhouse.shtml) but uses round bar, which was recommended by the metal supplier when I told him what it was for. (Round bar was both cheaper and longer than its nominal length, and rebar bumps don't add anything useful as hoop ribs.)
Knowing that I had much to learn about greenhouse operation, I didn't try growing anything in it the first winter. In the second winter I used a small electric fan heater under a tent of clear polyethylene, and the min/max thermometer confirmed that could maintain growing temperature even at -25C.
This has been a multi-year project, getting to know what's practical in my eastern Ontario climate, even with the addition of a rocket mass heater bench. I've discovered that summer overheating is a given, even with a covering of shade cloth, the south side rolled halfway up, and a 12" exhaust fan. I have plenty of garden space, so I don't have a need for a summer greenhouse and have decided to not bother trying that any longer. At a different latitude, the conditions would be different, but a three-season greenhouse works for me.

This was my solution to not wanting to dig a foundation because @ the time we had a lot of stuff on the propertythat was already in a fixed location & wasnt getting moved to incorporate something else on the property.

My wife got me a greenhouse kit off Amazon for my birthday a few years ago. And after kicking around different ideas, I decided to refinish an old spare trailer frame my father in law had sitting around. Sanded the trailer frame, repainted it, put down new decking & then started to build.

Its a 10ft x 7ft greenhouse setup.

I decided to put the GH on the trailer so that if needed, I could chase the sun around with the GH being on the trailer.

I love my greenhouse. It's small because I live in N. California and can garden year round, so it's unnecessary. I use it to start seeds in the winter/spring. I use it to propagate plants. My family love it too, because now I don't fill the dining room with seedlings for several months of the year.
My son and I built the frame out of 2X4's. The plan was to cover it with greenhouse plastic. Before we installed it my sister-in-law gave me a bunch of very textured glass, maybe for shower enclosure? She didn't know. About the time I realized it wasn't enough my nephew gave me 3 sets of sliding glass doors he removed from the house he was remodeling. Amazingly they were almost a perfect fit. I used the shower glass to make the top windows on the sides. The same sister-in-law gave me a glass door she got cheap that didn't work for her house. All in all I would say it cost less than 100.00 to build.
I'm not a carpenter, and there's lots of mistakes, but I learned a great deal.

Jen, that is the cutest, really the cutest little greenhouse I've ever seen! For not being a carpenter, you did an amazing job! It is just so CUTE!!  Can you tell I really like your little greenhouse?? :) :)  

Thank you Denise. When we were building the frame the only window we had was the one above the Hobbit door. I'm  quite short, and all my family are very tall, so they like to tease me. We were talking about what kind of door to put in, and  my son pointed to the space under the window frame and said put one there. I said that's too short. He said it's big enough for a Hobbit like you hahaha. Well that put the idea in my head and I just had to put in a Hobbit door. I discovered my son isn't good at finishing long term projects, or plan changes. So once the frame was built I was mostly on my own. (Did get help here and there throughout the build from both of my sons) It took almost two years to finish (with long periods of time no one worked on it). I decided it took this long, I was going to have fun with it, and make it unique. I'm pretty sure no one has a greenhouse quite like mine, and I love it.
I made a post of more details then you ever want to know. https://permies.com/t/257105/Jen-Greenhouse (I have forgotten how to link a post, so I hope this works)

I answered no, but not because I don't want one - only because so far, I just haven't worked it into the multi-resource budget - aka, time, 'spoons', $$, and a location that doesn't continue to over-tax the spoons, once it's in use, just by nature of being too far from the house. Someday.

My house in Ladakh, high in the Indian Himalayas, is heated by a seasonal attached greenhouse. It's UV resistant greenhouse plastic and I put it up in October and remove it in May (though I've gone into the previous or following months sometimes).

I love it.

I have greenery to enjoy in winter, a place to take my morning coffee and doodle around in the greenery. Winter greens like cilantro, dill,, lettuce, arugula, spinach, kale, parsley -- they don't mind freezing solid overnight and thawing in the day. Also flowers in winter -- one or another tazetta narcissus will bloom every month even Dec and Jan. Asparagus comes up in Feb -- only one little bed so it's not enough to take to the kitchen and cook, but I eat a raw spear every couple days in Feb and March when no other local vegetables are fresh, so it's inordinately exciting.

I've got grapes going blazes. I'm not sure if they'd survive and produce and ripen outside. I put some outside to test but they're not big yet. Anyway the ones in the greenhouse cast much needed shade in summer. They leaf out early because of the greenhouse, so I believe it helps. They produce a lot of grapes.

I start warm season veggies, first on a warm spot in the house in March or April, and after germination take them out to the greenhouse for the day, and back in for night. Then when the greenhouse doesn't seem to be dropping below freezing I leave them out.

I had a sink put in, in the greenhouse, a concrete platform kind of sink, so it works as a potting table, a place to wash carpets, etc. Indoor plumbing is a new thing there so we didn't think to put a shut off valve indoors, so the outdoor tap has frozen and cracked twice over the years, oops!