moving our greenhouse

if you recall, last year at about this time, we put up a temporary greenhouse. temporary as in we used plastic instead of glass and made it of a rather light construction. well, today, we decided to move that greenhouse to another spot - on more of a foundation.

we thought it would be a matter of loosening it, picking it up and moving it, but it turned out to be a little bit more complicated than that. and one branch of the mirabella tree was sacrificed. because that thing was a whole lot heavier than we thought.

husband got to use all of his inner engineering skills and we were thankful that the big girls were here this weekend, because we definitely needed some extra muscles.

we only moved it about 10-12 meters, but we had to go precisely between the mirabella and the currant bushes before we could turn it onto the new foundation. as you can see, some of the plastic didn't fare that well over the winter, but we've got a couple of new rolls, so we'll get that on in the next few days.

for the new foundation, husband repurposed some bricks from a wall we no longer want to have. i love when he does stuff like that. it feels a little bit modern-day little house on the prairie - making do with what you have.

we had tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplants in the greenhouse last year, but it felt a little bit like it never really got going. i think the dirt we got to fill into the boxes wasn't that great (it can be hit or miss down at the dirt guy) and we didn't fertilize it enough.

it also felt surprisingly cramped for being 5 meters long and 3 meters wide. we hope having it up on a foundation helps that - it already feels more spacious.

eventually, we are still going to be building a "real" greenhouse - brick foundation, glass windows. and when that comes, this one will become the cucumber greenhouse. another thing we learned last year was that tomatoes and cucumbers don't really like the same climate, so neither one did stunningly well, tho' we had both cucumbers and tomatoes - they never really came on properly and really produced. i don't know if moving it will help that, but it will help when we get the real greenhouse built.

we got a load of really good, rich compost soil from our local recycling station and we hope that it helps to have better soil this year. we're going to configure the beds a bit differently, to make it easier to weed and get to the plants.

this gardening thing is a process. and i don't always know what to learn from it, but it feels positive to be tweaking what we did and trying to improve it. i want to utilize the greenhouse longer into the autumn and early winter this year for salads and such. that i didn't try at all last year - it seemed like it was so hard to keep it going that i gave up rather early. i'll keep you posted.