How to Build a Greenhouse for Pennies – or Almost

            This time of year, weather permitting, is an excellent time to not only take advantage of any sunny day that brightens up our usually wet and windy winters, but it’s a great time to take a good look at the bare bones of your garden.  It’s a time to be moving plants, building structures, and changing any elements that have been bothering you during the last growing season.  Take a good look at traffic patterns.  Do you need new pathways?  Do you have too much lawn?  Do you need more flowers beds?  If you dig over your beds and cover them with compost in the fall, either home made of bagged, the winter rains and snow will leach the nourishment into the soil and come spring, given a quick turnover, your beds will be ready for planting.

               If you need a small greenhouse in which to start those seeds next spring and just don’t have the money for one, there are ways to beat the budget.  If you take three of those curved metal arched trellises that are available for about $9.00 in discount stores in the spring, and set them up all in a row, place some 2 x 4s around the bottom, and then cover the whole structure with a couple of rolls of the clear garden plastic that can be found for $4.00 to $6.00 a roll,  You can anchor the plastic to each support  with those short heavy metal or plastic spring clips that can be found at the dollar store as they work much better than the round tubular clips that are especially made to go over PVC pipe and are used for garden tunnels.   Now in about an hour, you have built yourself a fine little greenhouse in which to coddle your seeds and plantings next spring.  You can either plant directly in the ground or add a few plastic shelves, and when you are done with that, roll up the plastic, move the trellises to the garden to do double duty as supports for any climbing vine.   I don’t have a good photo of one but here is a small black and white picture to show the general idea.

Another method for recycling something that you might have around the yard is to dig out that plastic upside down shaped V pool ladder, cover it with plastic and place pieces of wood, or anything else that lays flat, such as old refrigerator shelves, or pieces of metal, across each step to form supports for holding trays of seedlings.  This has worked quite well for me in the past when you just need to protect a few new seedlings from the changeable, inclement weather of early spring.