Filling up the greenhouse.

We are now using the greenhouse for a variety of early starts, most of which are doing well.

It's been a bit of a struggle to keep the temperature down during our just ending heat wave and I just recently installed the sun shield, which did help a lot.  Now the weather is cooling off and going back to more or less normal, so I'll have to decide if I should remove the shield or leave it on.

I'm now in the process of connecting the drip water system and will hopefully be done with that before too long.  It was too hot to work on the pipes, so I put up a little canopy to get some shade:

The next day the deer took over, so I had to postpone my work for a bit, not being willing to roust them out.  They left on their own though, when the thunderstorm rolled through, which caused me to quickly dismantle the canopy.  It's back to being cool now, so I guess I'll have to get back to work.

Done with the hard stuff.

It's been a fun project but I'm still glad the construction type work is done.

Actually I didn't really expect to have it all put together till much later this spring and even thought it might not be done till summer sometime. Now that the mechanical work is all done, I will still have to do a little sprucing up like bringing in some gravel for the floor and spreading out a bit more fill to smooth and blend in the base with the rest of the meadow.  We need to decide where to put the shelves and I will likely build some raised beds to make tending things a little easier, plus adding in some automatic drip circuits.

We may even have to figure out what we're going to use the greenhouse for, though I think Marie is already formulating some plans.

Raising the roof

I got to work relatively early this morning and started attaching the various roof pieces which I had assembled in the shop. By lunch time I had the front roof section and all the supporting beams attached.

After lunch I started inserting the roof window panes and all the watertight fittings that hold the windows in.  I was about half done by mid afternoon when it started raining, though not too hard. I was getting so close to having the roof finished that I couldn't really stop. I've heard that if you live in Oregon, you are supposed to just take the rain in stride, so I continued on.

It's pretty much together now and is even waterproof, providing the wind isn't blowing. The next step is to mount the two louvered windows and then start putting the doors together. It's great to see it actually looking like a greenhouse.

It was a snow day.

It didn't seem reasonable to be working outside today.

Today was one of the very few snow days that we get here and even though the snow was all gone by noon, it still provided an excuse to take the day off.

Working around the rain

I knew the rain was coming so I got an early start this morning, or sort of early.  The first task was to finish the upper section of the walls, and that went pretty much as expected, although it did away with most of the morning.  The picture was taken late in the afternoon, though, in the rain.  The two missing panes are reserved for louvered window panels.

It was starting to rain by the time we were done with lunch, but that was okay as the next task was to assemble the first section of the roof.  I moved into the shop where I've been keeping all the pieces, then spent most of the afternoon getting the front wall for over the door done with just a single section of roof attached. Lots of hard squeezing and pushing to press fit the various parts together. The green storage racks in the picture came with the greenhouse package.

My hope is to just set this not overly heavy assembled section on top of the walls, fasten it down and then continue constructing the remaining five sections in place via a fair amount of ladder work.

Finally, the fun begins.

At last the prep work is done and the construction has started.

The walls seem to be going up fairly easily, or at least the lower section went okay.  The panels are a bit difficult to slide in and I suppose that will be even more difficult for the upper section, probably requiring some ladder work, which I'll start as soon as the coming rainy days give way to any sort of dry spell.