Budget greenhouse

[DonJones]

Looking good, leaf.

On the camo netting replacing shade cloth, I guess that depends upon what degree of shading you are trying to achieve. Depending upon whether the netting gives the same shade as the cloth, it should work just fine and be a whole lot cheaper.

Thanks to you and meds4me. I know this isn't what you envisioned but I think this basic idea would work great for deck cover so the other half will quit complaining about get rained on or the sun being too hot.

Thank you HippyInEngland for the map. It looks like my geography was quite hazy. My only excuse is it has been 50 years since I remember studying world geography and I'm getting old with a less than stellar memory.

HAPPY NEW YEARS AND GREAT SMOKING!

 

[cubby]

Hello Leafminer,
This is what I use for finnishing off my plants in the fall. As you see it's just a aluminum frame, 7' wide 8' tall and 20'long. The door is just a zipper at each side and one on each end. You can see in pic 5 so far snow has not been a problem. The temp in the greenhouse this time of year is the same as outside except for the wind factor so it seems about 15-20 degrees warmer.
The last pic is one of 5 NL's I grew this year. I grow in 5 gallon pots so that I can move them if need be. From 5 plants I got 26 mason jars full of excellent smoke.
On the subject of shade cloth verses cammo netting, shade cloth is by far the better choice. Cammo netting is not less expensive, it's way too heavy, the edges on the part that's supposed to mimic leaves is sharp and will rip your plastic, And cammoflage netting tells people you're hidding something ( the curiousity alone will draw more attention than you want)
Shade cloth on the other hand, comes in light filtration percentages from 10% up to 100%. It's reasonably priced, can be ordered in any lenght and width and can be cut to fit odd shapes ( and once cut it does'nt unravell), I use shade cloth on my pergolla as well to shade my house plants when I bring them outdoors for the summer. On the pergolla I use 2 50% shade clothes overlapped. They provide plenty of shade for me and my plants but still let through the rain that the plants love.
Well I guess that's my 2 cents worth. Hope I offered some help. And I'll be watching to see how this works out for you.
Take care and best of luck.

 

[DonJones]

meds4me,

How wide of an arch did you wind up with and how high? Also, if you used 4 sections of pipe why only 6 stakes or did you use 3 sections for arches and the 4th to cut the ridge pole pieces from? what strength/ grade pipe did you use, schedule 40 or 80?



Cubby,

Where did you get your portable garage from and can you design your own , buy the pieces and assemble it?

Thank you for the ideas and information.

Good smoking.

 

[leafminer]

Excellent, Cubby! Looks great!
Thanks for the note on the camo net. You've obviously been down that road. Where did you get the zipper?

Hello Leafminer,
This is what I use for finnishing off my plants in the fall. As you see it's just a aluminum frame, 7' wide 8' tall and 20'long. The door is just a zipper at each side and one on each end. You can see in pic 5 so far snow has not been a problem. The temp in the greenhouse this time of year is the same as outside except for the wind factor so it seems about 15-20 degrees warmer.
The last pic is one of 5 NL's I grew this year. I grow in 5 gallon pots so that I can move them if need be. From 5 plants I got 26 mason jars full of excellent smoke.
On the subject of shade cloth verses cammo netting, shade cloth is by far the better choice. Cammo netting is not less expensive, it's way too heavy, the edges on the part that's supposed to mimic leaves is sharp and will rip your plastic, And cammoflage netting tells people you're hidding something ( the curiousity alone will draw more attention than you want)
Shade cloth on the other hand, comes in light filtration percentages from 10% up to 100%. It's reasonably priced, can be ordered in any lenght and width and can be cut to fit odd shapes ( and once cut it does'nt unravell), I use shade cloth on my pergolla as well to shade my house plants when I bring them outdoors for the summer. On the pergolla I use 2 50% shade clothes overlapped. They provide plenty of shade for me and my plants but still let through the rain that the plants love.
Well I guess that's my 2 cents worth. Hope I offered some help. And I'll be watching to see how this works out for you.
Take care and best of luck.

 

[cubby]

Hey leafminer,
I got my zippers at my local Brew and Grow shop. They work really well. I think they cost like twenty a pair.
I am always trying new stuff in my outdoor garden. The white aluminum frame is from a Home Depot portable garadge ( $ 120 ). I removed one section from each leg to make it shorter (from 12' down to 8') and one section from each roof angle (shrinking the width from 10' to 7')
I had orriginaly bought this to provide shade for my house plants. I have since built a 10'x40' deck. 20 feet of deck is covered by a grape arbour and I cover this with shade cloth for house plants and shade for people.
Take care and good growing.

 

[leafminer]

I wish I had built the greenhouse years ago.
There's nowhere here I can imagine that will have zippers. I think I will either go with velcro or build a hinged wooden frame door since I have a wall to mount it on, and cover the door in PE film. I'm using 12 mil, pretty heavy duty. Hard to come by right now - the shops have been stripped of the heavier grades. I wonder why. . . I had to finish off with some 6 mil. It will be interesting to compare the life of each grade.

It would be interesting to compare for instance the cost and utility of using that corrugated plastic roofing material, I think it's about 8x4. That is what I used in my UK greenhouse. It was ok but not as durable as I'd hoped.

Cultivation notes:
The wall seems to act as a heat reserve to some extent. I am measuring 6C inside and 5C outside, but it has been cloudy all day. Plants are doing well, though. The sativa is about 2 ft tall and getting about 1/2" per day. I am beginning to believe it is possible to raise sativas very early by getting them going in the winter, using the greenhouse. I might just take a gamble and clone it. Has been a while since I have grown pure sativas.

Most useful tool:
Hot glue gun!

 

[leafminer]

Temps:
Outside today the temp was 12C and in the greenhouse 13C. Then the sun came out. Wow, the greenhouse really rocks! Within 10 minutes the inside temp had gone to 28C. The plants love it. Think I will have to line the back wall with Mylar!

 

[DonJones]

Leafminer,

Isn't 28C getting pretty close to as hot as you want the grow area? I'm a little rusty on the conversions but I thought 20C approximately equaled 70F.

I'm glad you are having such good results. Some friends of mine used that plastic corrugated rooking on a deck cover and had trouble with it overheating the deck without any side walls on it even. After they converted part of it to that translucent fiberglass type stuff, they had better results.

Unfortunately, where I live a greenhouse really isn't practical for even a legal grow because of the risk of rip-offs here in town.

If snow is a concern where you are, then make sure that your sheeting/roofing material will fail before the structure supporting it. It is a lot easier to remove the torn sheeting and replace it over a standing structure than to have the roofing tangled up with the broken structural pieces. Yes, that is the voice of experience speaking.

Looking great! Great smoking.

 

[DonJones]

cubby,

does HD or Lowes still sell the frame components separately for the tarp covered garage/deck covers or do you have to buy a whole garage and then only use what you want to use?

Lowes used to sell the corner and tee pieces and you could buy electrical conduit to join them with and pretty much make what ever you wanted to make out of them but I haven't seen them recently -- of course I haven't really been looking either.

Thanks for the help.

Great smoking.

 

[leafminer]

Today: Outside temperature 4C
Greenhouse temperature: 28C! (82F) wow this is great.
In summer I will HAVE to have shade cloth and some serious ventilation.
I'm thinking, maybe I can design/build a circuit that will control a cheap $15 pedestal fan. You know those have switches like on/off and different speeds. I was thinking, if I use small relays to replace th switches, and a simple temp control circuit to operate the relays, I could have an automatic ventilation system for very little money. I have a big junk box of components, I think I will have to do some thinking on these lines.

 

[DonJones]

leafminer, you might only need to use a thermostat to control the power to the fan without messing with different speeds and changing switches. Just a suggestion. You might also find that a simple timer might be enough too.

Great smoking man. Glad to see that your green house is coming along. Oh, from what I have seen, using the shade cloth to control the heat BEFORE it gets into the green house is probably easier and more effective than trying to get rid of it after it gets inside. One of the issues here is to have the shade cloth far enough from the surface of the greenhouse to allow sufficient air flow between them, according to my friends with green houses.

Of course you need enough fresh air so that the plants don't CO2 starve.

Great smoking man. Happy 2010

 

[leafminer]

Aha. Getting the shade cloth is going to be the problem. Thinks . . .

 

[cubby]

Hey Leaf,
I don't know what kind of shade cloth DonJones is familiar, with but the type I use,(the only type I'm aware of), dose'nt wieght anything to be concerned with, no more than a bed sheet. Additionaly it sits on the surface of your greenhouse and is secured at the edges, it does'nt magicly hover. Furthermore shade cloth provides just that, shade. It won't significantly affect the temps at all, ventilation does that obviously.
Best of luck, take care.

 

[DonJones]

The shade cloth I've seen is like a open weave canvas and is stretched either over a frame work like the portable garages or between uprights like an awning fastened to the side of a building on and poles on the other side. And it sure does effect the temperatures under the cloth, just like standing under a large fully leaved oak tree in the shade is cooler than standing right out in the glaring sun. Also it is very durable - they stretch it up and leave it up all summer through rain and windstorms. I've even seen it up during the winter with an inch or so of snow on it, but I sure don't recommend that, at least not in our climate where it can drop a foot over night real easily.

I first saw it used over produce loading areas in the Imperial Valley of California and then when I got back to NE Washington, I saw it being used over nursery stock. It is available in different shades too, like 10% supposedly cuts down the light and heat by 10%, 50% supposedly cuts down the light and heat by 50%and so on. I have always seen it in black, but it might be available in other colors too. I have seen very similar stuff used as portable sunscreens for automobile windows in varying colors. They even lade a similar "glue" on product our of film with tiny holes in it that looked like a solid graphic from a distance but was nearly invisible from inside of the auto -- I don't know what effect it had on light or heat because it was always sold kind of as an add-on one-way window graphic.

I'll look around and see if I can get any site for information on it.

From the way I've seen it used, I would attach one side to the shed above the top of the greenhouse, put a couple of stiff up rights in the ground at the outer edge of the awning and run guy lines from the awning down to the ground to stretch it between the shed and the uprights.

I thought about using it as a patio covering, but it doesn't keep the rain out so I decided that wasn't what I wanted.

Another thing to consider might be an inexpensive silvery or even just white poly tarp and if it cutout too much light an heat, you could always cut small openings into it to allow some of the light to shine through, or even just only cover part of the top of your greenhouse.

Great smoking.

 

[DonJones]

Here is a contact point for a Canadian company that manufactures the kind of shade cloth that I'm talking about. Maybe they can give you more generalized information than their site shows. It sure doesn't have much informatoin.

hxxp://www.ktcanada.ca/agri.htm Good, the darn thing did NOT turn into a live link!

In the mean time I'll keep looking.

Great smoking.

 

[leafminer]

Thanks for that. I've been thinking of getting some black mosquito netting, it's very cheap, and using 3 or 4 layers of it. In the summer of course.

 

[leafminer]

It gets terribly hot if I have the greenhouse closed and the sun comes out. I don't have any temp sensors but it ocurred to me that I have a left over photocell switch that has a 10A contact. So I'll partially mask it so that only when the sun is on the greenhouse, the photocell switch will cause the fan to vent hot air from the top. I'll try a small pedestal fan, they move a lot of air without too much noise.

 

[DonJones]

Several layers of the black mosquito net, might work out great. Please keep use informed about how it is going.

Great smoking.

 

[leafminer]

Some pics giving details.
The window . . . very simple. End view of the structure showing where the window fits. And the hinge detail. Yeah I know it's a bit crude but it should get the job done . . .

 

[cubby]

Hey leaf,
That looks like it should do the job. The stucco wall behind it is a great heating element in the fall and winter. It will soak up heat during the day and radiate it back out when the sun goes down. And those look like some pretty ladies poking up.
Best of luck.