We finished putting up the greenhouse and started to fill it:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
As you can see, the foundations we found were a mixed blessing: The walls we had to put on top are huge. That’s 2 tons of concrete, they’re about 25-30 cm wide when 15-20 would have sufficed. People who know how to do that shit may be able to actually do that, we didn’t and we’re quite proud, considering that neither of us ever did anything like this. Putting up the house itself was pretty easy, all in all. Now it needs to be filled. I put down old concrete blocks in the middle to form a path, now I need to fill about 30 cm of ground. Because I want to plant tomatoes, and since tomatoes will suck the ground free of nutrients, I organised a load of horse dung from a colleague. Sorry that my tomatoes are no longer hardcore vegan. I already put in the first 5 cm or so on Sunday. I can tell you, shovelling horse dung into a greenhouse in 27°C is not for people who enjoy breathing. Hopefully I’ll get the rest filled next weekend, so my poor tomatoes can finally move in, as well as the nice fig tree that I bought.
But do you know what the absolute best thing is about this whole project: I absolutely enjoy doing these things with my husband. Shovelling shit and pouring concrete may not be romantic, but working hand in hand on something for weeks and liking it, that’s compatibility.
Very nice!
Looks good!
On the fig be sure to confine the roots or it will take over the greenhouse,then break out, and I am really not joking. We had one on our … I hestitate to use the word patio as it implies something posh, so I’ll say the variously concreted area outside our back door in Sheffiled, Self seeded it happily grew to enormous proportions despite the foot of snow we got in winter, we cut it back when it started obstucting the way down to the rest of the garden at which point it was maybe ten feet all round and still growing hapily. It came back to the same size from being cut to the ground in around three years!
And yeah just doing stuff together is great :-D
When you go the mile and make your own substrate for the whole greenhouse, I would also recommend buying 10-20 kg of charcoal and running it through a garden-waste shredder (it will make a terrible mess and a lot of black dust, but crushing the charcoal by hand is a lot of work) and mix it in with the soil and the manure.
Jazzlet is correct with how fast figs grow, be prepared to have to cut it back every year or two a lot.