Gearing up for the pop bottle greenhouse

Its been a long and slow summer fueled by caffeine. No, seriously, I mean it.
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During hard times, one often has difficulty justifying bad habits. Drinking soda, for one. We justified it in three ways.

First...the price of soda in the plastic bottles has gone down, while the price of soda in cans has risen. So, hubby got his wish...we no longer drank out of cans. Secondly, hubby found a inexpensive alternative (please read: generic) to the sodas we usually drink that he actually liked, saving another 50 cents per bottle.

Third, and this is probably driving hubby nutty...I've been saving the bottles. I fully intend this year to make a greenhouse that's going to work, gosh darn-it.

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Two years ago, I had purchased the materials to make a hoop house. PVC pipe and clear plastic sheets. Woo hoo! I was going to have a nice hoop house. Well, I did end up building the hoop house. And we were able to get an early planting of peas and lettuce in....ah, fresh lettuce in January.

The problem was that hoop houses and Kansas wind are not good bedfellows. To give you a general idea...Chicago is called the windy city, and our average wind speed is actually higher. Is it any wonder why Kansas and Missouri are pulling out all the stops to put in wind farms for energy? I bet if the little town my grandfather lived outside of in NW Missouri put in a wind farm, they'd have enough to power the entire state.

But I digress. The teen and I had to reconstruct the darn thing at least once a day. We'de throw on our coats, slosh out through snow or cold mud, climb under the plastic, take our coats off, and put that tinker-toy back together again. Yes, it actually was warm under there! However, once spring ensued, the project was scrapped, and the materials were funneled into other uses.

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That summer, I had found a portable greenhouse on sale. Our local grocery store was trying to get rid of all of the spring stuff they had, and among them was a portable greenhouse, normally over $300, for $30 (along with $1 bottles of organic soil amendments and pesticides that normally sells for over $10 a bottle...you know I had a field day). I stood there and hemmed and hawed for a while...was it worth it? The plastic was hardier than my earlier construct. The tinker-toy bone structure was aluminum. And, like a tent, it had guide ropes to help hold it into the ground. Best yet, it has a zip-up door and a little window in the top I could open up to let heat out. And best yet, it had a set of shelves with it. The shelves alone would have cost that much. So I purchased it and brought it home, and set it up.

It was nice. Hot and humid. It protected some of our plants through fall. Then, winter came.

The first icy snow storm destroyed it. The metal actually bent! I was still determined, so I took some other materials we had, duct taped that sucker back into place and made it rigid. Then the seams ripped open.

Needless to say...the shelves are sitting in our front room. And the other parts have been recycled into row covers. The poles are great for tomato stakes or marking rows.

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And that was failure number two.

So now we're on failure...cough cough...project number three. A greenhouse constructed mostly of recycled materials. We have two heavy glass doors that use to be part of a tub's shower enclosure...it was over 30 years old, a pain in the behind as it was falling apart, and just needed to die. We have storm windows out of storm doors that died, as well as one of the storm doors (don't blame us...blame the people who had this house before us...I knew I was keeping that door for some reason.). We have wood left over from one neighbor's fencing project, another neighbor's house-beautiful project, and our own house-beautiful project. Not much wood, but enough that I think I can do something with it. I'm clever that way. And we have a whole butt-load of pop bottles.

Why oh why does hubby put up with me.

Yes, my pack-ratted-ness drives him a bit batty. But at the same time, he confessed to me last winter that if we had a nice warm greenhouse, he'd be spending time in it as well. Probably not gardening, mind you, just sitting. I myself don't trust the pop bottles so much as a wall in themselves, but they would work excellent as an added heat sink. And better yet, teen has been taking wood-shop this year, and now has a better grasp on stuff we always just winged before (my angel...we now have a lovely coat hanger to put by the back door).

Since yesterday was the day to shampoo the rug, today might be the day to get out in the mud. And it almost rhymes.