What Are Lean To Greenhouses? 

A lean to greenhouse refers to a type of greenhouse built up against the side of another structure. The lean to greenhouse has only one sloped roof. It has three sides of its own, and uses the side of another structure for the fourth wall.  

• Lean to greenhouses can be made of metal, plastic or vinyl (commonly referred to as polyvinyl chloride or PVC). The plastic materials used in building lean to greenhouses are usually coated with various UV protective materials to ensure the safety of the people who use them and so they last a long time.
• Lean to greenhouses are small, versatile buildings that can easily adapt to various climates and weather conditions. They work well in various environments and landscapes. Like fully-built greenhouses, they’re also able to withstand extreme weather conditions.
• Wondering what kinds of materials to use, and what sizes and shapes are available? Swgreenhouses.co.uk has a nice range here of lean to greenhouses for you to choose from.

Where to Place A Lean To Greenhouse?

Now that you know what lean to greenhouses are, it’s time to learn where you should place yours. Here are three options

• Over An Existing Porch Or Near Your Kitchen If you’re eager to grow more vegetables and herbs to eat, installing your lean to greenhouse near your kitchen makes a lot of sense. No matter what the weather, you can dash out to your greenhouse to gather herbs and greens or pick cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables that can be grown in a compact space.
• Adjacent to Your Deck or Shed Accessibility is key. Place your lean to greenhouse in a spot you can easily get to.
• NOT Under a Tree! Never install your lean to greenhouse directly under tall trees because of the following reasons:
  • Trees will cast shade, encouraging growth of green algae. 
  • Tall trees block light, and their falling leaves and branches may cause damage to your greenhouse and block guttering. 
  • Also, tree roots could upset the greenhouse’s foundation and make planting into the beds tricky. 
  • In addition, honeydew from insects coming from the tree’s foliage can make the plastic or glass material of your greenhouse sticky and hard to remove.

NOTE: Position Your Lean To Greenhouse South-Facing

When placing your lean to greenhouse, take stock of how much natural light it will receive. It will be shaded by the structure it leans on for at least part of the day. You want the supporting side of the structure to be on its north side, so as much natural light as possible bathes the greenhouse from the south. Plan to supplement with lighting, and potential some heat, especially in colder climates.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many ways to position your lean to greenhouse in your property. You can install your greenhouse over an existing porch or near the kitchen, or against an existing shed or garage. Just make sure to avoid installing it under tall trees to avoid mold growth due to light limitations and pest infestation. Also, it’s best to position your lean to greenhouse facing south for maximum sunlight exposure.

You can get more tips for building a greenhouse here.

NOTE: Paid partnerships and sponsors help us bring you the expertise you need to live the greener life you want. Our editorial positions remain our own. 

The post 3 Places to Put A Lean To Greenhouse So You Can Grow More Food appeared first on Big Green Purse.

There’s no better way to eat locally than to grow your own food. Maintaining a home greenhouse lets you do that all year round. With a home greenhouse kit, installing and maintaining a greenhouse has never been easier. Because I’m such a huge fan of growing your own and eating local, I’ve teamed up with Emerald Kingdom Greenhouse this holiday season to highlight the benefits of having your own greenhouse. Maybe it’s time to put a home greenhouse kit on your Christmas list!

Why Put a Home Greenhouse Kit on Your Christmas List?

1) Go Organic More Easily

Growing your own food gives you the power to produce organic fruits and vegetables that aren’t contaminated by toxic pesticides and herbicides. It’s easier to protect your plants from infestations from bugs like Japanese beetles, tent caterpillars, locusts, spider mites, slugs, and other pests, as well.

Plus, when you’re able to create an ideal growing environment for your plants, with healthy soil and just the right amount of irrigation, additional fertilizers, which may be full of excess chemicals, may not be required.

2)Eat Locally Grown Food 12 Months a Year

A big benefit of having your own greenhouse is that you can grow many of your favorite vegetables 12 months a year. As long as you maintain the conditions inside the greenhouse that your plants require, you should be able to keep your greenhouse producing. Greenhouses enable you to garden 12 months a year, in good weather and bad.

3)Keep Your Plants Safe From the Elements

One of the great advantages of greenhouses is that they keep your plants safe from the elements. This is particularly useful if you live somewhere where the weather hits extremes, with very hot or cold temperatures, or even lots of winds or regular hailstones.

Apart from just generally keeping plants inside a greenhouse protected, this type of structure is also handy when you want to transplant some of your yard’s plants or grow new ones from seedlings or other small sizes. When they have been moved or are very young, plants can struggle to survive if meteorological events like dust storms, blizzards, and high winds come along and erode the soil and buffer them about too much, so this protection can make a huge difference. It will also save you from having to race home from another location to try and cover them up if the weather changes!

4)Create the Optimum Growing Environment

Another reason to utilize a greenhouse is that doing so gives your plants the optimum growing environment, regardless of the time of year. When you use these structures, you can typically set the temperature, light, feeding, and soil conditions to the ideal levels, even if the conditions outside are completely different.

When you can have control over these factors, it means you can plant new crops any time you’d like, rather than having to wait for a particular season. Ideal conditions also help fragile or smaller plants to grow more quickly, while giving you the chance to grow plants which normally aren’t found in your region because they’re not sustained by your local climate. Compost works great in the greenhouse, too.

NOTE: You can put a small home greenhouse like the one pictured above in the middle of an existing garden if you need to protect or cultivate plants that aren’t “ready for primetime” in the main garden yet.

5)Grow Flowers and Houseplants for Your Home and Yard, Even in the Winter Months

If you prefer to grow flowers and houseplants rather than food, a home greenhouse still does the trick. When you add a greenhouse to your backyard, you can quickly start building up your collection of plants, by propagating cuttings from existing plants, sowing seeds in flats you can transfer to pots or the garden, and cultivating exotic species like orchids and roses that might not otherwise survive outside the protection of the greenhouse. You’ll enjoy having a botanical paradise to admire in the depths of winter!

6)Enjoy Gardening Year Round, and Any Time of Day or Night

If you’re one of those people who loves to garden and hates to put away your tools when the bad weather sets in, a greenhouse lets you indulge your favorite hobby no matter what the weather. You don’t have to stop gardening when the sun sets either. Just string some lights in your greenhouse and keep going.

7)Make New Friends

Gardeners are a sociable lot! You could end up making lots of new friends or traveling to more interesting destinations if you join gardening clubs and associations as a result of your new passion for greenhouse gardening.

8)Develop a New, Healthy Hobby

If you haven’t started gardening yet, take it up as a new hobby. Even if you don’t think you have a green thumb or have never done any gardening at all before, you may find that once you have a greenhouse, this all changes.

Here’s another benefit: being active bending, digging, and otherwise moving about in your garden throughout the year will help you stay fit and get you out of your chair or off the couch.

Plus, it’s really fun to watch a seed turn into a tomato or a big head of lettuce!

9)Create a Soothing Place to Relax

You can get a home greenhouse kit that’s small and devoted only to plants. Or, get one that’s a little bigger so you can set aside a corner as a place to relax and de-stress. Put in a comfortable chair, some of your favorite gardening books, a journal and an electric kettle so you can make yourself a cup of tea. Ahhhh…

Ready to Get Started? 

You can probably find the home greenhouse kit that’s perfect for you at Emerald Greenhouse Kingdom. Let me know if you decide to put one up. Send pictures!

NOTE: Partners enable us to bring you the expert content you need to live the greener life you want. All editorial opinions remain our own. Thanks!

The post 9 Good Reasons to Put a Home Greenhouse Kit on Your Christmas List appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Here are just some of the reasons why you might want to build your own greenhouse.

1) You love fresh food.

2) You  enjoy beautiful flowers and gorgeous plants.

3) You think gardening is fun, relaxing, and good exercise.

4) You wish your gardening season was longer.

5) You want to save money on seedlings, plants, and food.

Any one of those reasons may be enough to inspire you to install or build your own greenhouse. Here’s how to get started.

WHAT? Decide what you want to grow.
Is your goal to get a jumpstart on the growing season by starting seeds you can transplant as seedlings once the weather warms up. Extend the season on the other end and plant a “fall crop” of lettuce, spinach and other greens that you can harvest long after frost makes gardening in the elements impossible? If you live in an arid climate, do you want to grow tropical flowers? Or in a cool climate and want to cultivate cacti? Figure what you want to grow in your greenhouse so you can determine what you actually need to construct.

WHERE? Figure out where you will build your own greenhouse.
Will it attach to the side of your home, garage, shed, barn or other structure? Extend out of a kitchen window? Be freestanding in your yard or garden? Knowing where you will build it will also tell you how big it can be.

TYPE? What type of greenhouse should you choose?
Consider the frame, the covering, and the size. You can see several options at Garden Buildings Direct, our partners in this post and a company that offers reasonably priced greenhouse construction kits. Larger, free-standing greenhouses will need sturdier frames than those that attach to a building or extend out a window. You may also need to put in a floor, both to control pests and temperature, but also to have something to anchor your frame to. Speaking of frames, they come in a wide variety of materials: Aluminium (or aluminum, in the U.S.) will provide a strong, lightweight anchor to your greenhouse covering and will not rust. As greenhouse frames go, aluminium is the most widely used material and is extremely durable. Wood is more natural-looking and also provides ample support and structure. Galvanized steel offers another durable option. If you’re going the hoop-house route, you can use plastic piping that is light-weight and can be easily assembled and disassembled, depending on your needs. West Virginia University offers an excellent backgrounder on how to build your own greenhouse here.

GLASS OR PLASTIC?
Both glass and plastic sheeting are available to cover a greenhouse frame. Tempered glass is often used because it is two or three times stronger than regular glass, though it can still break. Glass also requires a more rigid frame construction than plastic. If you choose plastic, you can get double-layer plastic sheets that last a long time and are quite resistant to damage. However, the downside of plastic is that it is a difficult material to recycle and often ends of creating micro-plastic trash that is difficult to keep out of the environment. Fiberglass sheets are also available. Ultimately, the kind of panel clarity you choose will depend entirely on what you want to grow. Clear panels are perfect if you plan to germinate seeds and grow starters which will later be planted outdoors. The clear panels provide direct light that warms the soil and encourages germinating seeds to sprout. Using opaque panels are perfect if you want to grow plants all the way to maturity. An opaque panel quality is unique as it provides an even amount of light which allows for balanced foliage growth. Generally, clear panel greenhouses provide warmer, more direct light whilst opaque panels are ideal for growing crops long term.

HEATING? COOLING?
If you want to use your greenhouse during the coldest months of the year, you may need to install some kind of heating system, especially for when night-time temperatures drop below freezing. Alternatively, in the summer, you may need fans or a ventilation system to keep plants from baking. By its very nature, a greenhouse collects heat during the day and loses some of it at night. Take this into consideration when planning your greenhouse project. Ideally your greenhouse needs to release hot air in the warm summer months and retain heat during the colder months. Overheating is one of the main reasons why plants sometimes fail to grow in greenhouses, therefore you don’t want your green-house to be too hot. There is usually at least one vent in the roof that you can open in the morning of a hot summer’s day and close during the night. Installing insulation can cut nearly 50% off your heating costs, keep an unheated greenhouse frost free, and is also much better environmentally than using an electric heater.

WATER?
Do you need to install a hose and spigot in the greenhouse, or can you water everything by hand? It will depend on how large your greenhouse is and what you’re growing.

PESTS?
Yes, you can get insects in your greenhouse. You’ll figure out what your plants can tolerate, and what you’ll have to treat organically and with beneficial predators. Greenhouses generally protect plants from squirrels, rodents, deer, slugs and similar pests.

POLLINATION?
If you’re simply starting seedlings to transplant outside, you won’t need to worry about pollination. If you plan on growing fruits, vegetables and perennial flowers that need pollinating, you will have to do that by hand. Understand the requirements of the plants you choose before you start them growing.

Fertilizer?
One way to generate both fertilizer and heat in a greenhouse is by creating a compost pile in a corner. The compost releases heat as it decomposes. Once the organic matter is decomposed, use it as a healthy organic soil amendment.

Build Your Own Greenhouse to Save Money

Greenhouses are a great way to save money on seeds and plants. The sheltered area of glass transforms the whole growing process for seeds and seedlings and you can produce hundreds of new plants for a fraction of the cost. You can recoup the investment in your greenhouse in no time once you take into account how much money you are saving on store-bought seedlings as well as vegetables and flowers.

Good luck and happy gardening!

RELATED

Organic Gardening and Landscaping

Compost: Crack for the Garden

The post 5 Reasons Why You Should Build Your Own Greenhouse appeared first on Big Green Purse.