The Best Gardening Decision We’ve Made
Similar to raising chickens or owning horses, gardening is rarely about economy. A rational person would live amidst an untamed thatch, extol the benefits of extreme rewilding, and retire to the sofa—unperturbed by the horrors of fireblight, aphids, or drought. But gardening is, in subtle or overt ways, about manipulating the landscape to your own will. Even a plot featuring only native plants, striving for a “natural” look, will require hours of curating and culling. And for most of us at least a small part of our landscape plan involves exerting our personality on the garden. Leaving our fingerprints on the space. And that means plants. And the bigger the space, the more plants you need.
Here at Willow Greens Farm we’ve been faced with a simple mathematical truth: when you double the space (say from a 2’x2’ plot to a 4’x4’ space) you don’t double the area, you square it! So beyond the obvious dollars-and-cents “I now need 16 pink salvias at $9.99 for this garden instead of 4 plants” difficulty, you may find that your local garden center only has 7 pink salvias on the bench and you are left scrambling to rework the design or race around town in a fruitless quest.
Or you can buy a greenhouse and grow your own.
Having the means to purchase a greenhouse is indeed an extravagance. However, the rewards are so rich that it merits scrimping in other areas of your life. First off, a greenhouse increases the number of hours you can spend in your garden and in your gardening headspace. In January you have a reason to pore over seed catalogs. In February you can begin the actual work of filling trays with compost. And in March, while others can only grab a few hours tidying beds, you have kicked off the year in earnest. They may be braving the elements on a 40 degree day in a gale force wind— you are basking in a 75 degree hot house searching for the sun cream.
A greenhouse also gives you an almost unlimited choice of plants for the coming year and teaches you about the lifecycle of the things you choose. Fancy starting a few delphiniums? Why not, you are just risking a $5.99 seed packet. Maybe this year I’ll create a long border of Borage and Agastache. Two 72-cell trays should do the trick, and rabbits (an animal I actually really like) can be thwarted, to some degree, by starting with 10” plants instead of seeds. Making decisions about what to start in flats, what’s best in plugs, and what needs a 4” pot has certainly increased my horticultural knowledge.
If you own a greenhouse you can be generous to your friends and neighbors by providing them with free plants. Things like tomatoes and hot peppers come in seed packets of 25 or 50. Laura has finally convinced me that growing twenty tomato plants, and watching most of the fruit rot on the vine because you’ve eaten, sauced, and given away everything the market can bear is a waste of time and resources. So we start a packet’s worth of plants, keep three of each variety for ourselves, and give away the rest. I’ve heard that plant exchanges exist that could really add variety, but we’ve never really hooked into that network.
And in spite of what I said earlier, greenhouses are all about economy. A rough tally on the benches tells me that we’ll push somewhere around 500 plants out of the greenhouse this year. Yes, some of those are annuals and vegetables, but a large percentage are hardy and tender perennials that can really add up at the nursery. If you have a large garden, A greenhouse is a big upfront investment that can pay back very quickly.
We chose a model that falls somewhere between the “By appointment of his Majesty King Charles III, provider of glasshouses to the gentry” structures that cost more than our first house, and the thin plastic suit bags that cover a rickety frame. There is a greenhouse to suit any space and budget. Ours is 10’x15’, with an aluminum frame and real glass roof and sides. With two automatic roof vents, one manual roof vent, and a louvered side window, it helps combat your biggest enemy: overheating.
A small heater allows us to choose a day in mid-March and declare the greenhouse to be frost-free from that point. We start our first seedlings on a heat mat in the barn but as the season progresses, we move from that somewhat grim environment and do our germination and potting-on right in the greenhouse. By May 1, the entire space is completely full. Now that we’ve hit peak greenhouse, the fun really begins. Hopefully during the next couple of weeks most of our stock will be hardened off and will find permanent homes throughout the property. In spite of this, I’m sure we’ll find ways to spend plenty of money at our local nursery.
NB: The Chelsea Flower Show begins on May 22, and if you have the slightest interest in gardening, you must tune in to the Beeb’s coverage (via Britbox in the US) every night of the show. I’m sure Monty will be there in an ill-fitting suit, Joe in his ever-present Panama Hat, and Carol wearing the Drawing Room curtains. Everything fantastic about gardening will be on display, and it will have you champing at the bit to get stuck into your patch.
I won't have a greenhouse in this lifetime, but I do enjoy reading about yours, as well as stealing ideas for plants.
A very helpful and timelt post as I now have more time to spend in my greenhouse. The note about moving starters to bigger plants was a goid lesson for me.