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Tag: mini greenhouse

The Mini Greenhouse Repair Fail

You’ve probably seen one or three of my mini greenhouse plans videos. The most recent one talks about the complete fail of the plastic cover in the middle of winter. Here are the photos that show my attempt at repair before the complete breakdown of the covering.

My big mistake 4 months prior to the fail was to put screws through the top of the PVC pipes, and then lay plastic sheeting over the screw heads. Who knew that the metal screw head would eventually puncture through the plastic, starting as all holes do, small.

Prior to the small hole caused by the screw, all was good in the mini greenhouse. These rosemary plants had over-wintered well. Not so well after the plastic ripped though.

My attempt at repair was to use packing tape over the screw head and the splitting plastic. I knew it was not a 100% guaranteed repair, as it was cold out when I applied the tape. I don’t think other tape would have worked either. The glue on tape is not cold friendly.

That small hole grew through the winter, with the weight of heavy wet snow, and lots of wind. Then we had even more wind and that caused the complete tearing of the mini greenhouse cover. Darn. It sat for a while before I was ready to walk over and deal with it. Besides, there was still 18″ of snow on the ground. I knew all the plants inside the hoop house were toast.

Going forward I will use UV rated greenhouse plastic, I’ve seen some that is reinforced with netting in the plastic. AND I will screw the screws into the PVC starting underneath it, through the wood crossbeam, then into the pipe. If you have some old storm windows on hand, you can make a neat cold frame with them.

In the meantime, check the video where we walk through the fail:

May 3, 2017
Mini Greenhouse Build #1 – GardenFork.TV
This is the first mini greenhouse build we did and we learned a lot. We have built several more since, and they are great garden season extenders. I start my salad greens early and can keep kale growing into winter with a PVC mini greenhouse. Watch the how to video:

A few tips on the Mini Greenhouse Build
- You can use 3 mil clear plastic from the hardware store.
- Buy the most flexible PVC tubing you can find.
- Be sure to have plenty of staples for the staple gun.
- Use at least one thermal vent.
You can get a UV resistant greenhouse plastic, but I don’t. My thinking is a tree branch or dog is probably going to crash through the mini greenhouse before the plastic is broken down from sunlight. Be sure to double over the plastic where ever you are stapling it to the frame. Where the plastic wraps over the edge of the plywood end, you can run duct tape or a slit rubber hose over it to reduce the chance of tearing.

There are several kinds of PVC pipe available. Go to your local hardware store and test the different kinds to see which bends well for the size greenhouse you are building. Pick up some pipe holder brackets from the electrical department of the store to hold the PVC to the wood frame.

Buy more staples then you think you need. I always run out! Hammer in any staples that don’t go in all the way themselves. Fold over the plastic where ever you staple it to reduce tearing.

Thermal vents are key here. The mini greenhouse build can overheat easily. I use at least one vent, if you use two, put one high and one low on opposite ends.
Buy the vent here.

If you are building this to sit on top of a raised bed, make the dimensions slightly smaller than the raised bed size, so the hoop house will drop just inside the borders of the bed, makes it much easier to deal with that way.

Four-Season Harvest The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener

Our cold frame hoop house greenhouse is based on those built by Eliot Coleman in his book, If you follow the procedures outlined by Elliot in his book, you can harvest food all winter. nice. We also learned a bunch from Nikki Jabour’s book. (affiliate links)

Hoop House Cold Frame #2 – DIY GF Video
March 7, 2016
Cheap Cold Frame How To – DIY GF Video
Here’s a cheap cold frame you can make out of scrap lumber and a window. In this video I’ll show you how to build the cold frame in a few hours. With this rig, you can do some winter gardening, and of course we have some videos on that, the links are at the end of this post.

Some enhancements I’ve done with we made the video:
- I painted the cold frame with outdoor latex paint, 2-3 coats is good, as plywood does not like to get wet, you know.
- I split open some old garden house and slipped it on the bottom of the cold frame to keep the wood out of the dirt.
- I’ve grown vegetables in winter for several years. Neat.
I’m betting you can find enough scrap lumber to make this a recycle or freecycle project. The wood doesn’t have to be finish grade, and one of my pieces was warped, but it worked anyway. The hinges I had laying around, and the only thing I had to buy was the thermal vent.

What grows well in a cold frame? I grow cold hard salad greens and kale. Kale will grow in snow. I’ve dug it out of the garden and its still green in February. You can buy winter salad green mixes from the seed companies. Mache is a neat green that not many people grow, the seeds are kinda tiny.

If you don’t get the auto vent, you will have to open up the frame on warm days. You will be surprised how hot it can get in a our cheap cold frame, even if it didn’t cost us any money to build.

The biggest problem with this rig is the glass. It can break. That tree limb could have landed anywhere, but it landed on top of your super cheap cold frame instead. I have replaced the glass once. Luckily I had some spare windows that I salvaged a piece of glass out of. You might try putting some screening over the glass to protect it. Just a thought.

Below are some suggested books for winter gardening, let me know your thoughts.

Watch all of our hoop house videos here.

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February 9, 2015
Hoop House Cold Frame #2 – DIY GF Video

This is the second DIY Hoop House Cold Frame we have built in our video series. Easy to build, this mini greenhouse allows you to grow plants in winter. Watch the video here, plans and photos are below as well as links to our other DIY Hoop House Cold Frame Videos.

This cold frame uses a wire mesh that’s usually used for concrete, but it works really well as a cold frame form to hold the plastic up. I like how it works
You can buy this concrete reinforcing wire at a local lumber supply yard. It comes in two thicknesses, you want the thinner gauge wire, the thick wire is too much, I think. This wire also comes in rolls, but the it is a pain to work with. The mesh I bought was 10’ x 5’.

To cut the wire mesh we use a right angle grinder with a metal cutting disc. Be sure to wear ear and eye protection and wear gloves while you’re handling this material, it can cut your skin.

Be sure the cut end of the wire mesh faces the plywood end, else the plastic can get sliced by the sharp ends of the wire. You can put pieces of old garden hose along the end of the wire mesh where the plastic bends over to form the end wall, as well as on the plywood end to protect the plastic from the hard edges of the wire and wood.

But you can build this! It’s not hard and I really like it. Another great version of the hoop house cold frames that we’ve built, we have a whole series of them – link here – and every time we make one we get better and better. The super cool part is that you can extend your growing season in the fall and you can use one of these cold frames to warm up the soil in your vegetable beds in late winter and plant seeds even earlier than you could normally. Cold frame hoop houses are especially good for salad greens, radishes, sugar snap peas – plants that are cold tolerant.

You can use scrap wood to tie the corners together, or use brackets.

The automatic vent that we use is kind of a specialty item but that they’re not that expensive. Here is the link to buy it.

You could put one vent in or you could put in two vents. With two vents you would put plywood at both ends of this cold frame. Having a vent on both sides allows more warm air to exit. Cold frames can get quite hot, you don’t realize how much solar energy the sun has even in the winter. You will need to vent the hoop house, you can go out on sunny days and manually vent it if you want by lifting up the cold frames, but I’m not there all the time. So I like the automatic vents.
Have you made a cold frame? Do you have anymore questions? Pease leave them in the comments below.

My cold frame experiences have been greatly influenced by these books by Eliot Coleman and Niki Jabbour.

Four-Season Farm Year Round Vegetable Gardener (affiliate links)

Watch more of our hoop house cold frame plans videos here.

PVC Cold Frame Hoop House #3 – DIY GF Video

February 7, 2015
PVC Cold Frame Hoop House #3 – DIY GF Video
Easy to build PVC Cold Frame Hoop House is a mini greenhouse that allows you to grow salad greens and cold tolerant vegetables into the winter, and get a head start on early spring planting. This hoop house is more resistant to heavy snow than our previous versions, listed below.

This is version 3.0 of our cold frame hoop house. What I like about this one is that it’s a taller than our previous cold frames, so you could start to grow tall plants like kale or start sunflowers earlier in the spring.

A couple things to keep in mind while you’re building this hoop house, especially if you are using this on raised beds. You want this hoop house to fit just inside the walls of your raised bed. I made this mistake when I made my first hoop house, I didn’t measure how wide my raised bed was and the cold frame didn’t fit exactly. Experience has once again taught me something. The frame fits just inside the wooden sides of the raised bed and it doesn’t have to have a super tight seal with the soil, you do want some air exchange in and out. What the hoop house is doing is moderating temperature. When it gets really cold outside, it’s going to be cold in there but it will extend your growing season.

Consider planting some cold tolerant greens in August, I like a salad green mix that sold by Fedco seeds. They have a fall and winter lettuce greens mix and that’s worked really well for me.

One thing I did not mention in the video is that where the plastic meets the plywood ends of your hoop house, the plywood can cause the plastic to tear and so you might want to put something soft around the edge of the plywood. If you have some old garden hose you could split the garden hose open and run that along the edge of the plywood and that would go a long way toward making the plastic such that it wouldn’t rip.

For this 8′ x 4′ cold frame I used:
- Two 2×3 8′ long studs
  Two 2×3 studs cut to 45″ long
  One 1×2 8′ stud, you could also use a 2×2
  4 metal angle iron brackets
  3 pieces of 1/2″ Schedule 40 PVC cut to 6′ long
  1 1/4″ and 1 5/8″ drywall screws
  Two pieces of 4’x4′ thin plywood. You could also cut down a 4’x8′ piece.
  3 or 4 mil plastic, i used a roll of 10′ x 25′, which is enough for two hoop houses.
  Two thermatic vents, available here http://amzn.to/2Cg81fg
  Staple gun
Using the angle brackets, build a 4′ x 8′ wood frame, make sure the shorter pieces of 2×3 wood (the 45″ pieces) are inside of the larger pieces, so the outside dimensions are 48″ x 96″

I cut the plywood ends to match the arc of the pvc hoops. Take one of the hoops and curve it into the wood frame at the end of the frame, and use this to sketch the arc on the plywood ends, it does not have to be perfect.

My hoop house cold frame gardening has been greatly influenced by Eliot Coleman and Niki Jabour.

Four-Season Harvest The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener

Watch all of our hoop house videos here.
November 6, 2014
Repair Of Our Hoop House Cold Frame : GF Video

Setting up our simple cheap hoop house greenhouse for seed starting. This PVC hoop house cold frame works well for us and it was easy to build, here is the video of us building our the hoop house. The hoop house greenhouse allows you to get a head start on planting vegetables and seed starting. We started this in February to start warming the soil. This can be made for free if you find some scrap leftover lumber and PVC pipe. This plan uses short lengths of PVC pipe, which you may find laying around your yard, or your neighbor’s yard.

My hoop house plans for this mini greenhouse are simple. Some 2x4s, some PVC pipe, and a piece of plywood. The thermal actuated vent keeps the hoop house from overheating. Link to buy the thermal greenhouse vents

I use 3 mil clear plastic from the hardware store, it lasts a few years with care. I hang our mini greenhouse on the back of a shed when i am not using it. To attach the plastic to it, I fold the plastic over on itself and use lots of staples. You could also use a piece of lath or thin wood to hold the plastic to the wood. For the ends, I staple the plastic to the plywood end with the thermal vent and then cut off the excess plastic. For the other end of the cold frame hoop house, I simply bunch up the plastic and staple it to the 2×4.

After a few days on your vegetable bed, this portable greenhouse will start warming the soil. Its amazing how warm it is inside the hoop house compared to the outside temperature. We have a video showing how a hoop house greenhouse can defrost your garden soil coming soon.

In the video, the plywood I used for the end of the greenhouse, OSB, is not the best kind of plywood for outdoor uses. Use a better piece of plywood and paint it with a few coats of latex paint, it will last much longer if its painted.

Click here to watch our How To Build a Hoop House Cold Frame Video

Click here to watch How to build a cold frame video.

Learn how to grow food year round, read Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest book and Nikki Jabour’s Year Round Vegetable Gardener.

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Do you use a hoop house greenhouse? let us know comments or questions below:

April 2, 2013
The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener Book Review

I was looking forward to reading Nikki Jabbour’s The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener because my farming apprenticeship had a significant focus on season extension, as the farm is currently going into its twelfth month of continuous harvest. But we were growing in Virginia, whereas Ms. Jabbour has succeeded in maintaining a year-round garden in the more challenging Nova Scotian climate. Because of this, her book achieves its subtitle: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live.

Listen to Nikki talk with Eric on GardenFork Radio here.

The book is chock full of information, from the basics (timing the seasons and intensive planting) to the complex (building structures to capture and maintain heat). It is comprehensive enough that a relative novice could start with The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener as a valuable resource. A more seasoned grower might be tempted to skip over some familiar-sounding sections, but I would urge you to read cover-to-cover as unique and useful tips are sprinkled throughout the entire text.

The chapter on winter gardening progresses from light protection (like row covers) to using an unheated greenhouse or building your own polytunnel, so a grower in any hardiness zone or variously sized growing space can find techniques to meet his or her needs. The plans to build your own cold frame or polytunnel are easy to follow and call for inexpensive materials. Plus, the chapter motived me with photos of lusciously green vegetables thriving alongside snow and ice.

Like many other gardening books, this one concludes with a crop index. Ms. Jabbour recommends specific cultivars based on cold or heat tolerance or days to maturity and includes an emphasis on vegetable varieties less talked about in other books; for example, Tatsoi has its own entry.

In short: I love this book. It’s a wonderful resource for year-round vegetable growing knowledge and inspiration. Now, if only I didn’t live in a studio apartment!

Order from Indie Bookstores here

Order from Amazon here. (affiliate links)

Grocery Gardening a new cooking gardening book that works

February 17, 2012