I have had a rush of blood to the head recently with the onset of the cooler weather and some welcome time at home, and have been doing a bit of tidying up around the house and garden. After cleaning up some plants around the pergola and getting rid of some of the clutter, I turned my attention to the greenhouse and a job I had been putting off for some time

Our greenhouse has been in place for a couple of years now since a friend and I built it to pool our resources and use it as a shared facility (you can read about it here). It has been a real boon in extending the growing season for many plants and also for growing some plants that would be difficult otherwise. However. I have not really used it as well as I could partly because of the way it had been set up.

Originally, I had a section down the back of the greenhouse for my plants while my mate had the bulk for his Aloes. It was, and is, a good arrangement except for one thing. As the aloe plantings have expanded and grown it has been becoming more difficult to get to the back of the greenhouse on a regular basis. The area was being used less and less simply because it was hard to move things back and forth and to water etc. without getting caught on the spines or damaging some of the rare aloes. I had been thinking about re-arranging things to move my section to the front as it was the most used and now was the perfect opportunity as a few weeks ago my mate had taken a lot of aloes away to sell at a plant shows.

 

There was a lot grunting and heaving and lifting and carrying and sweeping and more sweeping and yet more sweeping. I must have swept out about 10kg of dirt, sand and weeds!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also took the opportunity to recycle the table frame I rescued from the hard rubbish collection a while ago and a section of second hand mesh fence to build a propagation/potting table for the greenhouse.

 

 

 

 

 

Securing the mesh to the table frame

 

 

 

 

 

 

It turned out really well, and the only cost was the price of a few screws and a piece of scrap bracing strap for brackets.

 

 

 

I also rebuilt my climbing frame ready for some winter tomatoes and cucumber. We’ll see how well they turn out.

Everything has been moved now and it is so much easier to access the area and materials like potting mix, and water the existing plants.

It’s just a matter now of cleaning the pots and get planting 🙂