The Door Garden

<< Building the $50 Greenhouse

Welcome back Stumbleupon Gardeners!

If this looks like too much work – I did a much simpler door on the other end.

This weekend I finally got time to start on the doors for my 50 dollar greenhouse.  The design that I came up with is light, strong, simple, and can be built easily and quickly using only a circular saw and a hand drill.  I must admit that I did use a table saw to rip out the stock, and put it through a planer to accurately dimension it, but this was only a convenience, and isn’t at all necessary for a good result.  This polytunnel door design can be built on a set of sawhorses out in the driveway, but it will be a lot easier if you get someone to help you hold things while you saw, drill and fasten parts together. (more…)

• Want to find out if this thing works before you read all this?  Read 6 months in the Greenhouse.
• There is another article on Building the Greenhouse Doors.

My $50 Greenhouse

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Materials list

Construction Steps

Hind Sight – What I would do differently

The planning is over and construction on my hoop house greenhouse has begun.  I’ve rounded up all of the materials and it looks like I’m going to end up with about $50 in a 165 square ft. green house. Granted I already had most of the materials because I’m an incorrigible pack rat, but even if I had bought everything new just for this polytunnel It would still only come to about $120 $150 – less than a dollar per square ft.  Due to the fact that we are in the midst of a global economic meltdown, and the future is a bit uncertain keeping the cost of this project as low as possible is an important consideration. (more…)

I’ve been kicking around the idea of building some kind of greenhouse for several years, but I think that I’ve finally decided that in my case the most practical way to take that plunge is going to be with a small hoop house. The main thing that I think I want to do with a green house is to be able to grow salad greens through the winter, get a head start on spring without having to worry about the occasional late frost that we get here in middle Tennessee, and maybe extend tomato season for a few weeks in the fall.

My garden has two central beds which are 3 feet wide, about 50 feet long, and have a 5 foot wide path between them. I think that I’m going to build my hoop house over these existing beds and the path between them, and design the end walls so that I can still run my lawnmower and rotor tiller through the beds even after the greenhouse is in place. This will make my green house eleven feet wide and probably about 24 feet long. I’m still kind of in the planning/brainstorming stage at this point, but I’ve run across a couple of sites which shows how to economically build a hoop house about this size using common building materials, and this article from Washington State University.

Update: I’ve actually built my greenhouse now and writen a post with lots of pictures about the whole process. My 50 Dollar Hoop House Greenhouse.