Tour of Susan's GH (lakesidecallas)

OK, here is mine. Not as big and beautiful as Gothqueen, but I love it!

This is the North (ish) end facing the house, viewed from under our porch. You can see my potting table outside. Underneath it are all the pots of the callas I lost when our barn got too cold. (sob, sob!) To the right under the tarps are bags of potting soil from last year. I store it in dog food bags, soil bags, whatever!
The area wasn't as flat as we thought it was, so we needed to build a base. The steps came from a neighbor that was redoing their deck. (For the first summer I stepped in and out of the door, my shins are permanently scarred from cracking them on the sill).

Here is the side of the GH on a lovely day (LOL). Our greenhouse is a "Natural Ventilation" model, it has big vents on both sides and a smaller one along the top. Blowers keep the poly vents inflated during cold weather, then when it is warm the sides deflate. The idea is the wind comes in the sides and pulls the heat out the top.
The vertical bars are there to keep the polyvent in place. Think of an inflatable raft to float on in a pool (the cheap old fashioned kind), that is what the vent is like.
The chimney is for our wood stove, and DH Harry added the downspout. We get an amazing amount of water off the roof.

To the left as you walk in is my poor Iochroma bush, the spider mites love it but it has been blooming all winter.

This is a wider view of the left. Fertilizers are on the red shelf, back up battery for the blower is on the shelf thing next to it (Harry made that). You can't see the battery, some pots are in the way.
Woodpile for the stove and wood drying on the sill of the GH.
You can see one of the blowers in the middle of the photo. Each side vent has two blowers and the top vent has one. Each blower has a back up battery in case the power goes out.

We got some free GH tables from Craigslist, had to cut off the legs to get them home, so they are on concrete blocks.
The first table is about half Clivias from my former Clivia obsession.

In the middle of the table is a Chorisa, a silk floss tree, that has never grown straight. It is getting a nice bonsai look to it, though. To the left is a Pachira something, a money tree plant. They are usually kept small or bonsai but I wanted to see how it would grow. In the middle is my dead dwarf Mango. After 4 I gave up, this one was nice and green and blooming and turned brown and died practically overnight. On the right is a dwarf tangerine.

Next table has citrus, some from seed. You can see Sparky the GH cat drinking out of one of the water buckets. My kindling box is on top of a kitty cube.

Backing up and looking down the length of the GH, you can see the wood stove, furnace, GH fan, wood drying in the aisle. The skinny tree to the right is a Cinnamon, not the spice variety though. It was only $5 so I thought I'd give it a home. Bugs love it.
The white thing to the right of the stove is a piece of metal sheeting for a roof, designed to keep the direct heat away from the plants. It works, the sheet can get pretty hot but I have some jade and other things right behind it and they are fine.

This is the electronics panel next to the door we came in, Harry did the wiring himself, has a fuse box, and temperature controllers for furnace, upper vent, and two side vents. One of the side vent controllers in covered in the picture. When it rains, the GH leaks here and there, of course right onto my dry wood pile, so I have it covered with a bag.
The cardboard tube was for poking at the vents, when we first started using them they wouldn't want to shut tight so I'd give them a little shove.

Here's the floor. We discussed what type of flooring, but I wanted to go with dirt. Not a great idea, the dust from the floor covers all the plants! But I wanted to be able to walk barefoot if I wanted to.

This is another Choriosa sp- silk floss tree. I've had it quite a while and it was one of the first things I bought on ebay. It's over 8 ft in it's pot, which is why I decided to move from 6 ft side walls to 8 ft side walls. With the wooden base, the GH is really almost too tall, though.

Here's the base of it, I just love it. If you like oddball plants this is a good one.
In south FL these will grow to be huge trees with fat round bases.

One of the Wollemi pines.

This is a Musa Basjoo that I'll probably plant outside and leave out next winter. Behind it are the Brugs from the Brug co-op last fall. Way to the left is an Australian fingerlime tree, and in the back is the banana table, and the back (south) door of the GH.

Some of my variegated White Callas. I used to hate variegated plants, but I'm starting to like them, especially the green/yellow ones.

Guess what this plant is!

To the left is either an Ice Cream banana or a Thousand Fingers variety.
Right lower corner is a co-op Brug, behind the mystery plant is a citrus tree a friend grew from seed. It's now about 12 ft tall.

Here in the back it's a mess, just not enough room!
Hibiscus and citrus to left, seedling on my (cheap) shelves, Hardy citrus poncirus trifolate, cane Begonia

I used to be on another plant list, and a woman told me she collected Phormiums. I was totally unimpressed at the time, now I love them. Not quite hardy here, I'm trying to keep this one in a pot.

Another one of my oldest plants, a Pachypodium (if I recall correctly). This poor baby grew for years as a houseplant or in the basement over winter. It's probably stunned it has warmth and sun now!

Some more inhabitants of the greenhouse, our new Rhode Island Red chicks. All girls, supposedly.

One of my new oddballs, a skeleton bush/plant. Crooked little stems with leaves that are dark green on one side....

And white on the other! Freaky!

Wood for the gh stove. We're extremely lucky that we have a log cabin building place down the road, they throw scraps of wood on a big pile and people are invited to come in and take it home. Some of the pieces are really big. It's pine so it burns fast, but it's free!

We live in the woods so we do have a lot of dead and fallen trees, but the terrain here is so rough it is so hard so get up and down the hills, especially carrying or pulling big pieces of wood.

Of course I had to include a Calla.... lol

I love the GH with the sun coming up behind it. Kind of dark here but you can see the propane tank and the vent coming out of the gh from the propane furnace.

The redbuds are in bloom now, here's a picture of Puppy on our porch, guarding the GH and driveway. English Mountain in the background (part of Smokie Mountains)

Almost done now!
The next day was nicer, the GH sides came down. You can look through to the other side and see the other vent part of the way down.
Each side has 2 motors, The first motor cuts off and the side lowers about 2 feet. Then as the GH continues to warm up the second motor will cut off and the side lowers the rest of the way. This way when you just need a little cool- off inside, the sides don't have to open all the way.

One of the things about the GH we didn't like was the doors. There is no latch! The two doors just swing shut against each other. On this door we have to prop things against it to keep it closed. Here's another view of the propane tank, the propane line going into the GH and the furnace vent coming out.

Here is a view looking in from the outside. If you look up at the peak of the GH, you can see the upper vent (look for the very blue sky). This vent is controlled by the same inflation system as the other vents.

You can see the pipe coming up from the stove. The stove is small and was only about $100, but all the piping and connectors were expensive! They've paid for themselves this winter, though. We only filled the propane tank at the start of the season and it is still almost full.

Last one! Here is the wooden frame that Harry built to hold all the pieces for the stove pipe going through the greenhouse roof. It's bolted to the roll form and purlins. If you think it was easy getting it up there into place, it wasn't!


Harry and I had someone build the wooden base. We put on 3 sections of the roof, but then hired some guys to come out and finish the roof and sides. They needed a cherry picker to get up that high.

We did all the metal work, though, put up all the purlins and roll form, etc. It was really hard work, and at times very frustrating, but it was all worth it! I just love my GH.

Next time I'll try to get some better photos of some of my other plants.

lakeside...what is the brand of your greenhouse? i really like it! virginia

I love your GH, thanks for sharing.

It's a Poly-Tex XA 210
http://www.poly-tex.com/pages/greenhouses/greenhouses.html

I bought it through Gothic Arches Greenhouses because I didn't know about PolyTex at the time.

Also forgot to say Poly-tex has the best customer service EVER! Jon at the customer service desk practically became a member of the family. We were on the phone with him almost every day, really! Sometimes several times a day.
During construction we had 2 sets of visitors in a row, and Jon ended up calling us because he hadn't heard from us in a few weeks and was afraid we fell off the GH or something, lol!

I also got some shadecloth from them, the seamed variety with grommets. MUCH cheaper than anywhere else.

It was hard to find a greenhouse that fit our needs, I wanted the visibility of polycarbonate, but I also wanted it a little bigger than the average hobby greenhouse.

Thank you for the wonderful tour. I viewed and enjoyed each and every enlarged photo. How long did it take to put up and fill with your plants?. A couple of years?. Very nice.

We had the GH delivered 3/7/07 and finished putting up the polycarbonate 8/1, and I think by the time we did the vents and the electrical, furnace, water and propane it was the beginning of October.
Here's a view from a ladder 11/12/07

Ha, just found this photo. This is why we only got up 3 pieces of the polycarbonate before giving up. Here's Harry trying to drill a long screw thru the PC and into the steel, which was really hard to do.

Did I mention he's afraid of heights, too? You really needed wings to be able to work on this...

Oh, forgot about this part! Peeling the protective coating off the polycarbonate. Most of the time it would not come off, we tried soap, we tried everything. The fastest we ever got a piece off was 30 minutes.

And here was the first purlin going up 3/13.

I really enjoyed this tour. Thank you.

You have a splendid selection of plant's in your GH!

Your Musa Basjoo look's great. I have one that will be planted in the ground soon here. It has grown tremendously here for me as an inside plant since I purchased it in late Fall as a baby and it has gotten quite large over the Winter.

Rachel

Edited: variegated plant's are a weakness of mine;-) Is the variegated lilly hardy to our zone?



This message was edited Apr 7, 2009 11:04 PM