Building Your Own Greenhouse

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Introduction

Every greenhouse described in this book exists. I have been inside almost all of them—and most of the exceptions, like the cold frame, are not designed for human occupancy. In a great many cases, I have been in them in the dead of winter. They work as described. With the exceptions noted, they were built by the owner, with or without the help of other amateur builders.

Some owners, while happy to talk about and show off their handiwork, preferred to remain anonymous. Some, apparently, would be glad to have the whole world visit their greenhouses. Partly to be consistent, and partly to protect even those who didn’t think they wanted protection, I have used only first names throughout. In most cases, they are the actual first names of the owners. I also have given no information about locations, but all of the greenhouses described are well north of the latitude of New York City and Omaha. In other words, all are in climates with winter temperatures that drop below zero and plenty of snow.

It seems to me unlikely that a reader will choose to reproduce down to the last detail any greenhouse, huge or tiny, expensive or very cheap, that has been described here. It is rather my hope that you will be motivated by this book to build your own backyard greenhouse, designed to suit your needs and desires, using ideas and techniques gleaned from this book. If you do, I guarantee one thing: Although there will be moments of doubt, depression, and despair, when you have finished the construction, you will find that the greenhouse functions far better than you dared hope it would. And you will have to admit that building it was at least half the fun.

PART I

An Overview

1

Background

Human beings have always sought to control or alter their environment. Greenhouses are a fairly recent example of this, probably because the first rich and powerful people lived in hot climates. Their desires ran less to finding a way to have oranges in winter and more to having snow brought from the mountains by relays of runners, to cool their wine or make sherbets. History does not record what happened to the last runner in the relay if he produced for the emperor’s delectation a bucket of warm water.

There may have been earlier examples, but the first greenhouse of which there is a record was built for the Roman emperor Nero. In addition to liking fiddle music, Nero had a fondness for cucumbers. The climate of Rome is too cool to grow cucumbers year-round without artificial aid, and so the emperor’s gardeners constructed the first known greenhouse, using mica in the windows. Glass had been known for thousands of years, but only as a material from which to make art objects or dining utensils; it was not used as a building material until the great Gothic cathedrals were constructed. Apparently Nero’s greenhouse was a success: The emperor got his cucumbers, and his gardeners kept their heads.

By the late Middle Ages the centers of power and wealth had moved north, and British and Dutch gardeners, some of them early botanists, constructed heated rooms in order to grow tropical plants and other delicacies in a temperate climate. These rooms were often called orangeries; the tastes of wealthy northerners apparently ran more to oranges than cukes. Orangeries often had glass roofs, together with masonry walls through which ran flues carrying heat from wood or coal fires. British architects in the nineteenth century brought the construction of huge greenhouses, called conservatories or glasshouses, to a fine art.

Nowadays you don’t have to be rich to have your own greenhouse. A garden cold frame or hotbed can cost less than $50, and you can put up a decent 12-by-20-foot greenhouse for well under $500 if you’re willing to search for inexpensive or salvaged materials, and if you’re willing to read this book carefully and thoroughly and try our way first. It helps to be fairly handy with tools, but it’s not essential. In many ways, a simple greenhouse is easier to build than a simple doghouse. Dogs are notorious for refusing to spend time in the doghouses built for them, but plants have never been known to walk out of the building.

There are certain things you can’t do, however, at least not without spending some real money. They are discussed in the next chapter. Meanwhile, here’s a hint. A Vermont resident who has his own home-made backyard greenhouse told me, God could grow oranges in Vermont in the winter —as long as he had plenty of money!

The next chapter explains how greenhouses work and describes the two basic kinds. Each chapter in part II explains the basics of one part of do-it-yourself greenhouse construction, such as framing or insulation. Part III describes a series of actual owner-built greenhouses of both kinds, beginning with the simplest and ending with a home addition large enough for more than a thousand plants.

2

Principles and Types of Greenhouses

Anumber of books refer to solar greenhouses. I find this puzzling, since there is no such thing as a nonsolar greenhouse, at least not in my experience. A lunar greenhouse would be romantic, but a hard place to start tomatoes.

For most people, a greenhouse is a place to start and grow green plants. For a few of us, it has the secondary purpose of collecting solar energy with which to heat, at least in part, our houses. Most people know what plants need: warmth, light, air, water, nutrients, and, some say, love. This book discusses water, nutrients, and love only in the most cursory way. It is primarily about providing plants with light and warmth.

In a greenhouse, the two are pretty much the same, and they are provided primarily by the sun. Growers sometimes add artificial light and heat, which this book will discuss. It is possible to grow green plants in your basement totally with artificial light and heat—some people do— but here we are talking about light and, for the most part, heat that are furnished by the sun.

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

Every greenhouse is based on a simple principle of physics called, appropriately, the greenhouse effect. It was discovered several centuries ago, as soon as transparent or translucent materials began to be used in windows. It works like this: Sunlight passes through translucent or transparent materials such as glass or any one of various plastics. When it strikes an opaque surface, some of it is transformed into heat. The darker the surface, the more light is changed to heat. Glass and similar materials transmit light quite well but are fairly opaque to heat. Therefore heat, to a considerable degree, stays inside a building that is made, wholly or in part, of glass—assuming the building doesn’t have too many air leaks.

That’s all there is to the greenhouse effect. To demonstrate its effectiveness, park your car where the sun can shine into it for several hours, and leave a chocolate bar on the seat. Even in February in Michigan, the result is impressive.

HEAT LOSS

There’s a bit more than that to greenhouses, but not much. One basic problem is that the sun doesn’t shine twenty-four hours a day. As soon as it stops shining, the temperature starts to drop. Loss of heat that was compensated for during the day becomes a highly significant net loss when there is no heat-producing light streaming in, which happens at night or on a heavily overcast day.

Heat energy always travels from the warmer place to the colder place. It is transferred in three ways: conduction, radiation, and convection. Conduction can be illustrated by a poker. If you put one end of it into a fire, after a while the other end will burn you, because ferrous metals conduct heat well. For an illustration of how much better a conductor steel is than wood, go into an old-fashioned attic in winter. Nails protruding through the roof will be covered with frost, because they are colder than the wood—they have conducted the heat out—and water vapor has condensed and frozen on them. That’s one reason houses are built out of wood rather than steel. Your goal in building a greenhouse is to use few or no materials that conduct heat readily.

Radiation involves the transfer of heat even if there is no medium, like steel or air, through which it can pass. If you sit in front of a wood fire and look at it, you can feel the heat on your face, even if there are glass doors it must pass through. The source of heat energy is radiating that energy outward. The most important way in which radiation affects a greenhouse builder is in loss of heat to the night sky. Heat will move at night through overhead glazing, as in a skylight, many times faster than it will travel through glass walls.

Greenhouse owners usually refer to convection as air infiltration. If warm air—not heat but the air itself—can move out of your greenhouse, then cold air will enter to take its place. It is crucial that a greenhouse be made as airtight as is humanly possible. Unfortunately, it is also crucial that it be ventilated, at least if plants are to grow in it. There are a number of ways to solve this problem; most involve exchanging air when the greenhouse atmosphere is quite warm, which is of course in the daytime, and sealing it up as tightly as possible at night.

All greenhouses suffer heat loss. The builder’s goal is to limit this loss, through insulation or by storing energy in heat sinks, or to replace the heat with a heating unit.

Insulation

Many greenhouses, especially those attached to a home, are not made entirely of glass. (Throughout the rest of this book, the terms glass and glaze will be used as shorthand for any kind of transparent or translucent substance used as a surface material.) The north, east, and west sides may be partially or totally opaque and stuffed with large quantities of insulation.

In addition, greenhouse owners employ various ingenious kinds of insulating shutters, which are removed when the sun is shining and placed over the glass areas at night or on dark days. This can be done by hand or by some kind of mechanical device. Any way it is done, it’s a pain in the neck, but heating an uninsulated glasshouse all winter is an even bigger pain in the pocketbook. If your name were Rockefeller or Trump, you wouldn’t care about cost—and you probably wouldn’t be reading a how-to-do-it book.

Heat Sinks

A heat sink consists of material that absorbs heat energy slowly when a room is warm and gives it off slowly when the room begins to cool down, in other words, material into which you can sink heat. Water is an effective heat sink, which is why coastal land generally has a milder climate, with fewer extremes of heat and cold, than land far from any water. Water is also cheap, but it is difficult (although not impossible) to incorporate it into a wall, which is why dense materials such as sand, stone, and masonry are more often used as heat sinks in greenhouses.

THE TWO KINDS OF GREENHOUSES

There are two basic kinds of owner-built greenhouses, freestanding and attached. Which kind you want depends on why you want a greenhouse at all. If you just want to extend the growing season, starting a garden a month or two earlier in spring and carrying it on a month or two later in fall, you probably want a freestanding design, especially if you want to keep costs to a minimum.

If you want to grow plants all year, especially exotics like cacti or orchids, or to start seedlings in January or February, and your desire to do these things has outgrown all your sunny windowsills, you need an attached greenhouse. You also need one if you want to add to your home what used to be called a sunporch or conservatory and is now often called a sunspace. This is a room in which you can live year-round as well as grow plants, one that will provide your home with a net heat gain, although you may have to heat it artificially in the darkest months.

Freestanding Greenhouses

With exceptions, such as the one noted in chapter 15, people who build their own greenhouses that are intended to be, like farmers, out standing in their fields do not expect to use them during the coldest and darkest period of the year, from about November 20 to February 10. The exact dates depend on climate, latitude, and the design of the greenhouse. Such greenhouses may be built very lightly and cheaply, with sketchy or nonexistent foundations, frameworks of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe or light lumber, and glazing of 6-mil polyethylene.

They may have water and electricity laid on, but usually they don’t. They may have fans, but usually they are ventilated simply by opening doors or rolling up the plastic on one side as far as desired, or both. They are not used in the dead of winter, and they are seldom used in midsummer, when temperatures inside them are too hot for most plants and many gardeners feel there’s no need for a greenhouse.

One thing you will learn from this book, however, is that backyard greenhouse builders are individualistic, if not downright iconoclastic. There are examples here of freestanding greenhouses with foundations, with several different high-tech glazings, and with sturdy timber framing, as well as ones with vents, fans, plumbing, and even supplemental heating systems.

Attached Greenhouses

An attached greenhouse may be as simple as a bay window, but it is essentially a room added on to a house. If it is much more than a bay window, it will probably have an extensive foundation and sturdy wooden framing, and glazing that uses double thermal panes. It will have insulation, heat sinks, water, and electricity, and it will be a usable room all year, although it may be a bit chilly at night in the winter months. Such a room could become hot on a sunny summer day, but good design can overcome that tendency.

Except for commercial growers, most people don’t try to grow plants in a freestanding greenhouse year-round, because they don’t want to spend the money to keep such a structure warm. A room in a house is a different proposition: You expect to pay more to heat each additional room. A sunspace will assist considerably in heating your house on sunny days during the heating season, thereby cutting your heating bills. At night or on cloudy days, you can heat it in the same way you heat the rest of your house.

This can be done by installing radiators or baseboard heating systems, but many people simply have large doors and vents between the sunspace and the rest of the house. These are open when the owner wants warm air to pass between the sunspace and the house (in either direction) and closed at other times. An attached greenhouse may be allowed to cool down to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit on the coldest winter nights. If there are plants that can’t stand nights that cool, the owner can either bring them into the house proper or spend the money to keep the sunspace as warm as the rest of the house all night.

Whether you build an attached or a freestanding greenhouse, and regardless of what you may read elsewhere, you can’t grow tomatoes year-round in the North unless you are willing to spend lots of money or lots of time, probably both. To grow almost anything year-round north of Georgia, you will need to spend a fair amount of money on lights and a considerable amount of money on heat. What you can do with a reasonable expenditure is provide yourself with a structure in which the usual kinds of not terribly exotic houseplants will thrive, or in which you can start seeds in late winter and early spring to get a jump on the season or provide yourself with varieties of flowers and vegetables that are not available from the local outlets.

Nobody knows more about gardening than the Rodale group. More than a decade ago they conducted exhaustive experiments on growing foodstuffs in unheated greenhouses in winter. Their conclusion, in a nutshell, was that plants could be grown in such an environment only if three conditions were met: First, the plants were very unusual cold-weather crops, mostly mustards and cabbages native to China; second, the greenhouse was about half underground; and third, an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming system of shutters was put up every night and taken down every morning. Furthermore, their experiments were done