A major advantage (okay, some may call it a disadvantage) of farming and homesteading is that whether you like it or not, you become a master of DIY. We’ve learned carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, HVAC, and more to implement our farming systems. With each new power tool and each trip to the hardware store, we add a new skill for the future.
Installing our greenhouse was almost definitely the most consequential DIY effort of the last year. Going in, neither of us knew anything about how to build one, yet our greenhouse is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the farm. Putting it up was both a challenge and a joy!
How Does a Greenhouse Work?
Our greenhouse could be more appropriately called a “high tunnel”. We purchased this tunnel from Rimol Greenhouses.
It’s a 16′ by 48′ structure made up of a set of 13 “bows” or metal hoops that are 4′ apart across the length of the tunnel, held together by a few metal “purlins”, and covered by plastic. Simple, right?
The tunnel arrived on a pallet, broken down into individual bundles and bags of specific parts. The ultimate adult Lego set, if you ask us. After unloading it all from the truck, we quickly found the instructions and got to work.
Step One: Ground Posts
The first thing we had to do was drive all 26 of the ground posts 2 feet into the ground to mark the base of each bow. This involved a whole lot of measuring. Not only do you need to make sure each post gets placed at exactly the right location, you also have to keep it perfectly straight as you hammer it into the ground with a sledgehammer.
Three or four of our ground posts didn’t meet that second requirement, mostly due to huge rocks below the ground that skewed our posts. Setting the posts was probably the most strenuous part of the build.
Step Two: Building the Bows
Next, we built each bow on top of each set of posts and added purlins. This basically resulted in a big metal skeleton that looked a lot like a greenhouse. This part of the job was mostly just bolting metal together, and lots of little trips up and down a ladder.
Step Three: Adding the Walls
After that, we framed the end walls and baseboards with wood. The wood did not come with our kit, so we had to make a trip to the hardware store to stock up.
This step was fairly easy, as we had some experience working with 2x4s.
Step Three: Time for the Roof
Next came the most thrilling step, adding the roof. This is quite literally the difference between a greenhouse and no greenhouse.
We had absolutely no clue how a sheet of plastic would stay attached to a big metal skeleton, but it turns out that it’s an extremely simple and reliable solution: wiggle wire!
Wiggle wire is basically a big clamp on the perimeter of the plastic. A zig-zag wire gets pinched into a channel along with the plastic, and the tension of the wire trying to break free pinches the plastic without cutting or ripping it.
Apart from actually lifting the plastic over the frame (it’s surprisingly heavy), this step was easier than we expected. I continue to be amazed at how well wiggle wire holds the plastic, even through 60mph wind storms we get in the winter.
Final Touches: Doors and Vents
Our last step was adding doors and vents to the house, and voila! All in all, we worked on the house sporadically between August and September. We’d estimate something like 100 hours of labor went into building it.
In the future, we hope to add another greenhouse and improve on that time!
A Few Notes and Observations
The first thing that I would say to anyone who is looking into adding a greenhouse or hoophouse is that you should strongly consider wind.
If you live in an area that even occasionally experiences the kind of wind that blows lawn furniture around, spend extra to ensure your tunnel has wind bracing. We are very certain that our greenhouse would be crumpled into a ball without Rimol’s wind bracing, which thankfully does a great job.
As a newcomer to greenhouse growing, it’s also amazing how well the “greenhouse effect” works. On a sunny day with outside temperatures in the 40s, the inside of the house easily breaks 95F before the vents open up to cool the house.
This year will be our first vegetable growing season in our house, and we’ll put all of our tomatoes and the majority of our peppers in there. We are particularly looking forward to trellising our tomatoes (surely a future blog post).