Greenleaf Organic Micro Farm: Every Micro Farm needs a Greenhouse

Every Micro Farm needs a Greenhouse - Part 1

February, 2017

If you look back on some of the previous posts you will learn that an important part of our micro farm is the ability to extend the growing season for our location in Northwest Pennsylvania. While we have lots of ideas, who isn't short on money.

The objective: a cost-effective greenhouse which can allow us to start seeds in the early spring, expand our micro grow zone in the summer, and extend our grow season into the late months of the year.

We also, with our desire to produce our own super foods, wanted to be able to eat a fresh highly nutritional diet year round. Don't get me started on out-of-season veggies that come from the other side of the equator and are "ripened" in shipping containers. Anyway . . . .

It was the cold snowy months of winter when we first started dreaming about our own micro farm. The first thing we learned was: that greenhouses are expensive. OK, time to get creative. Functional, but affordable.

We saw these little baby greenhouses on Amazon for couple hundred dollars. We ordered the 6 foot by 8 foot version for $300. I attempted to set it up in my living room. Yikes! Horrible instructions, translation issues, missing pieces, and angle cuts all backwards. Send it back.

*Now that it is summer, I have since learned that these same greenhouse kits are $600.

Then one day, a circular advertisement came in the mail. The same, somewhat questionable, greenhouse kit was on sale at Harbor Freight Tools for $200. What? We jumped in the truck and got the very last one. Knowing that other one was a nightmare of quality control, I decided to view the kit as material and toss out the instructions. Another issue was that the original design would never hold up to the fierce winds and heavy snow fall of the lake effect weather.

So, I used the free version of Google Draw to design a precisely scaled version of a more practical version. A wooden wall would shield the structure from the wind and the polycarbonate panels and aluminum frame would be supported by a 2x4 skeleton. All while trying to keep the costs down?

To the Rescue - Purple Dots

One of the Big Box DIY stores has this practice of culling the wood which has been sorted through and passed over by the average Joe. I guess if you are going to pay full price for the dimensional wood, you only want the most pristine. Great for me because I work around the flaws through careful planning. Frequent trips to the local DIY and we amassed all of this for 30% of the original cost. With hangers, screws, and lumber - another $150.

With our background in education, we also wanted the project to be able to be used as a demonstration piece. This included the mobility to transport the entire system to an elementary school parking lot or the country fair. The floor of the greenhouse is built on skids so that the entire unit can be loaded into U-haul.

This was a February weekend and it was sunny and 75 degrees. We built the floor in my car port in the city. Decking was added from various random purple dot, re-purposed wood sheeting, and all saturated with wood stain bought from the miss-tint section of a paint store.