The Greenhouse Before!

It’s been a few years since I had a green house at my disposal and I’m really pleased the previous owners of our house left this one behind. An essential component in the Self Sufficient Gardeners arsenal, the Green House will be a very busy place indeed. At least that’s the plan.

Ours is 6′x8′ and is in pretty good condition although it still needs a little TLC in places. It’s perfectly good enough to grow a few Tomato & Cucumber plants this season though, and will probably keep our lettuce crops going until well into the winter with any luck.

The only big problem with this greenhouse though was that it was standing on a fully slabbed base, meaning Tina & I couldn’t plant anything directly in the ground, which is in my opinion, essential if you don’t want to be watering your Tomatoes every five minutes during hot summer months!

One Of The Dug Out Beds

Making The Beds

To solve this we grabbed a hammer and bolster chisel and started to hack away at the slabs until we could remove a few sections of the slabs each side to make a couple of beds about 6 feet by 1.5 feet. Now I honestly thought, as it’s a greenhouse, the slabs would either be laying directly on bare earth, or maybe a couple of inches of sharp sand, but no. This greenhouse base was built to survive a world war! Firstly there was 4 inches of quarry waste and chippings to get through! Followed by another 6 inches of rubble and hardcore!

IT’S A GREENHOUSE FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

So what I thought would be an afternoons work, tops, turned out to be a day and a half’s worth of shoveling and wheel-barrowing!

Tina Preparing The Beds In The Greenhouse

Filling Up The Beds

Once the beds were dug out it was time to fill them all back in again with top soil we’d saved from leveling the chickens run and a couple of bags of decent quality peat free compost. We chose peat free for the reduced environmental impact on our rapidly vanishing peat bogs! To add a bit of extra Zing to the beds we also mixed in some well rotted Chicken Manure (which we always have plenty of!). This should give our crops a bit of a boost with any luck.

Getting Rid Of The Bugs & Nasties

Once the beds were ready it was time to give the greenhouse a quick clean to rid any remaining bugs and nasties from the place.  The best way to do this is with a liberal dose of Jeyes Fluid. It’s easy to use, cheap and very effective. You can get it at any diy store or buy it online if you wish. It’s a general disinfectant that will kill off most things but won’t harm your plants or your pets.

A couple of buckets of Jeyes fluid were mixed up and we gave the whole place a darn good scrub, rinse and left it to dry overnight…

I can’t wait to get the plants in now!…