Our lean to green house

 Finally our greenhouse is finished! Tho these pics are from this spring and therefor not all that up to date :) The greenhouse is made with a locally harvested and milled hemlock frame, salvaged window sides and a greenhouse plastic sheeting roof.

I picked up insulated 4 foot square windows on craigslist right at the time we started construction, which meant I had saved up WAY to many little windows over the years! It took many, many listings on Freecycle to free up that space again! The double hung windows front and back can open and are instrumental in summer for a cooling breeze. There is also a one foot wide opening in the roof under the shed overhang that's open (screened) which helps with passive airflow. Initially I had installed bug screen but then found the plants were not fruiting (DUH!) so exchanged that with chicken wire (pollinators in, chickens out) and before I knew the plants were setting loads of fruit.

The rubbermade tub in front of the greenhouse is for the ducks and geese. There is a gutter spout right over it (from the shed overhang) so with enough rain it self fills and self cleans real nicely. About once a month I empty it out and dump all the water and mud in the greenhouse - with all the fowl poopies it's the perfect poopie tea!

 It was a joy having our tomatoes in it, and also, to have early and late greens like chard and mizuna. I ended up bricking the central path, don't want to weed that, but I also ended up removing most of the oregano as it grew right over the path and was too hard to navigate thru. This summer we grew mostly tomato with some pepper and basil. Next year the basil will go where the oregano was so they don't get as easily overgrown with the monster tomato plants.

I also added a flower garden in front of the greenhouse, initially to sow flowers - hence the fence, to keep the chickens out of the seeds. It morphed into a perennial herbal tea and soap garden with lots of bee balm and European stinging nettle for tea and chamomile & comfrey for soap making. Nice! I ended up running my solar dryer for most of the summer...