An Idea Is Born: A Do-It-Yourself Winter Greenhouse Down East

(By Linda)

It begins:

Really, it was all Margaret's idea, though I don’t know if she realized I'd take her seriously at the time.  We were talking on the phone a few weeks ago, catching up, and in response to my casual comment that it was really hard to feed 4 teenage boys (ok, I exaggerate; one won’t be a teen for another 5 months), not to mention the other 3 people in the house, she suggested that what we needed was a greenhouse so we could extend our growing season.  The idea settled into my brain like a little seed, took root, and soon began to send forth a perky little shoot.  Sure it's Oct., not exactly the beginning of the gardening season in Maine, but who wants to wait until the spring to try out an idea this good?  Why not start a greenhouse now and just plant cold-loving vegetables?  

Our back yard in winter: how can we keep gardening year round here in Maine?

The plan takes shape: 

Building a real  greenhouse would obviously be way too expensive and time-consuming, so we needed a way to efficiently design a thrifty alternative with user-friendly construction techniques (in other words, I wanted to slap together something really cheap that would take almost no time to make.)

     The obvious path was to cheat and just close in our little front entry deck with some sort of cheap-o plastic sheeting.  It already had a floor, roof, and wooden posts to attach the plastic to, plus being right up against the house, it would probably be warmer than something that was free-standing.  PLUS it got some nice morning sun, as it faced southeast, and we had already grown lettuce there quite successfully for several summers in these nifty planters that have grooves on the bottom so they can sit right on the deck railing (donated by Jenna when she was ditching stuff for The Big Move- thanks, Jenna J )  PLUS we would be able to harvest stuff by simply opening the front door – no trudging through the cold and snow to get to the crop (notice that I am assuming there will be a crop and cold and snow at the same time.) 

     I should point out that in Maine, at least for some of us, the front door just isn't used as the entrance to the house.  I know that's a big Feng Shui no-no, but that's just the way it is.   I figured in the unlikely event that we had to exit really quickly in case of a fire or some other dire emergency, it would be pretty easy to rip through some glorified plastic wrap. 

Next time: an intriguing idea . . . but can it work?