Backyard Greenhouse Tour | Placement, Setup, & Gear!

It's the beginning of April and I'm hanging out here starting seeds in the open air, which is definitely a luxury. Most of us are starting our seeds indoors or maybe, just maybe, we have a greenhouse like our contributor, Chris, up in Vancouver, BC, who just gave us the breakdown a couple of videos ago about greenhouses. And now she's going to take us on a full tour. So join me as we head on up to Vancouver and check out Chris's greenhouse. Hey, it's Chris and welcome to my greenhouse. So today I thought it would be kind of fun to really introduce you to the space because I know it shows up in a lot of the videos, but I never really talk about what I'm doing in there. And I never really explained the setup. So today's goal is to just walk you through kind of my thought process when I first got the greenhouse and how I went about deciding how to set everything up so that it works for my gardening needs. So I bought this kit from BC Greenhouse Builders. They are a company located not too far from me up here in Canada, and they make a whole bunch of these beautiful greenhouse kits. This is the Pacific model that they have. It has this nice, beautiful curved roof and it sheds snow and debris quite readily. So that's pretty handy. If you're wondering what this material is, it is not glass. It is a plastic material. This is a twin wall polycarbonate and I chose this over glass because it has better insulating properties and it's just overall more durable as well. If you're wondering about the overall footprint of the greenhouse, this is an eight by 12 house. So it's quite manageable, but it still gives me a lot of space to move around in there. The greenhouse was installed November of 2020. So really I just wrapped up my second winter with this space. And what can I say? It's just been filled with learning opportunities as I switch up the type of plants that I grow in here. So the first months I had with the greenhouse, I focused a lot on growing a whole bunch of specialty plants for the purpose of plant sales. And although it was beautiful and very rewarding to have so many plants in here during my first season, it got overwhelming trying to manage all of that. So this year, the focus is using it as just like a general purpose workspace and also to grow subtropical fruits like back there. I've got some, what is it? Some mountain papaya, some strawberry guava and also all of my hearty citrus that actually need to go out pretty soon as the temperatures start warming up in here. The greenhouse is located at the front of the property and just North of the house. Usually that's not a good idea, especially if it's a taller house and it can cast shadow on the structure. You don't want that. But thankfully a lot of sun comes in this way, so I don't have to worry. But when placing a structure on the property, you think of it as like a garden bed where you're growing things like tomatoes that need sun. So you want it, um, ideally getting eight to 10 hours of sun direct sun coming from the South is ideal. And the orientation is really important. You want to have it lengthwise oriented from East to West, not North and South. The idea behind East to West is that as the sun arcs, you're going to get maximum sun exposure, um, on your bed. Same idea with the greenhouse. You want all continuous sun going in there throughout the day. Also when I was trying to find the best place for the greenhouse, I thought about the source of electricity and water. I wanted these things to be kind of close by so that it's handier and also being close to the house meant that it was easier for me to dash out and tend to the plants and maybe open vents if the temperatures got too hot. Whenever anyone asks, Hey, is a greenhouse right for me? Or Hey, I have a space. How do I set it up so that I can use it? Well, my question to them is what do you want to grow in there? And how do you actually see yourself experiencing your space? Are you going to be overwintering some things, um, just for the winter period? Are you trying to do like season extension or do you want to grow food in ground year round? Because depending on the answer, the setup is going to look very different. When I was researching for a greenhouse for my space, I knew the focus was always going to be propagation or starting new plants. It's just one of my interests. And I knew that was going to be a focus. So for me, no open exposed soil beds. It was going to be a foundation of like wood around the perimeter and a base of three quarter crush gravel, just something nice and clean and flexible so that I can install all sorts of workspaces and shelves. So right here I have two heavy duty metal shelving units, three tiers each, and I love them well worth the investment. I think they were about 150 Canadian each from a big box store. And I think they're just going to last a lifetime. They hold a lot of weight, which is great, especially since I put some large containers that are quite heavy from being well-watered on top of here. Now I could have built a more customized shelf for myself out of wood, but I opted for metal because I didn't want so much moisture in the greenhouse that would lead to potential like rot or algae or pests and disease issues, um, with the wood, depending on what type it could hold a lot of moisture. And I just didn't want to deal with that. So metal is durable and it's easy to clean and it's just super strong. And I think it looks pretty good too. Now I have them oriented, uh, east to west. So again, to capture all the light and I've placed these units on the south side of the house so that it captures the most light. So all of my young plants, all the plants that need to grow, they go on these shelves. This workbench here I built by myself. This is a simply two by four. And then I have these pretty inexpensive, uh, cedar fence boards that I'm using as slats. I really wanted cedar, um, as opposed to other wood because of its ability to withstand, um, breaking down with all that exposure to the moisture. So I chose sections that were kind of less expensive. So I just kind of built to suit these pieces here and it worked really well. And to save more money, I actually increased the spacing between each slat. Um, maybe not the most practical if you are trying to work with smaller containers, but I use a lot of one gallon containers and also flats. So I'm not too worried about it. And then for potting up activities, I have this piece of board on top where I just lay a tarp right on top of that. And I do all of the messy work there. So keeps everything really easy to manage. So nothing fancy, super practical and not expensive. I also want to mention that this entire bench runs east to west. It's like right opposite from the shelf. And what I'm showing you right here is how I protect my more tender propagation station from the scorching sun. So especially when I'm doing cuttings, which is a lot more sensitive than doing things from seeds or division, this allows me to comfortably put the plants here and then shade the plants so that they don't dry up or burn in the intense heat. So this makes it really practical and it adds another layer of functionality to this simple workspace. One of my favorite features of the greenhouse are actually these really simple shelves that I installed to three of the walls inside the greenhouse. So this has helped me increase my storage space, um, by the equivalent of 20 of these standard 10, 20 trays instead of taking a bench and workspace, they now live above all of this stuff. And so it really frees up a lot of space for other plants or other activities, or at least just keeps the place really clean. Now these were super easy and pretty inexpensive. These are L brackets that you would use to make a shelf for the inside of the house. And up here, these are just those inexpensive cedar fence boards. I just chose ones that suit the space. So I think altogether, like that was like a few dollars. And then up here was like another few dollars. So relatively inexpensive to really help, um, maximize storage area by doing everything vertically. So really the goal for this space, at least the setup is to keep it nice and simple and easy to clean because the fewer areas for pests and disease issues to kind of hide in the healthier, the plants are going to be. And that means the overall gardening experience for me is going to be a lot more positive. So I mentioned that I am starting to play around with subtropicals in here. I do have some fruit up here and also behind me. And you may be wondering what temperature I try to keep the house at now, because these are subtropicals. They don't like to be in temperatures that dip lower than 10 Celsius or around 50 Fahrenheit. So I do have my electrical heater right here that keeps the house pretty consistently warm, especially during the cooler nights. Now, last winter, I did add two kind of features to the greenhouse, um, to try to help better insulate or keep the house warmer without relying just on the electric heater. First, we have this shiny material back here. So this is the reflective bubble wrap. Not only does it help with actually just insulating the reflective material that I have mostly on the North side of the wall, um, helps bounce back the sunlight and, um, help keep everything warm inside. So I have it wrapped around this side right here. And the other thing that I did was add this piece of a thin board. And what that does is prevent the hot air that comes out of my electrical heater from going into this unused bench space down there. So I just store like pots and some other materials and I don't really need to keep that heated. So by having this section off, most of the heat just stays in the area where I try to keep most of my plants. Now in the future, if I want to reduce my reliance on the electrical heater, um, I'm going to try to make room for large dark barrels that I fill with water. So those essentially capture the heat from the day. And then as the nighttime temperatures start to dip, it will send back out some of that warmth to keep the overall temperature nice and warm. As we venture deeper into spring, I'm really feeling the warmth in here, which is great. But with any of these structures, we want to make sure that there's always good airflow throughout the space. Now with these residential size houses, um, they cool via roof vents because of passive cooling hot air rises. So I've got two big vents here and I also ordered an extra one for the back to improve the airflow. Um, so right now I have the door open and it feels really, really nice. Now when it gets hotter and I know it will get hotter, I also have fans positioned to really push the hot air out. We don't want any of these plants to get overheated because they can crash really easily. And trust me, it has happened before last year. Um, we got up to around 42 Celsius or just under 110 Fahrenheit, which was super hot. So that's why this year I may get an extra fan. And I'm also going to shop for shade cloth now with, um, 60 to 70% shade cloth applied to this South part of the greenhouse is going to help shade the area, keep it cooler and a bit more tolerable. Even if I'm not growing plants, it will at least keep the supplies that I have stored in here from melting. I try to keep the greenhouse at around 12 to 28 Celsius for the things that I grow in here. So of course, once it gets hotter, the vents help opening, the door helps, but I also have a thermostat that controls the fan and also the heater when it gets colder at night. So that keeps things pretty well regulated. Now with the thermostat, I have it hooked up to my phone app, so I can actually control it from inside or when I'm out and about, which is super handy. And also, um, in case the electricity fails for some reason, I also have this handy min max thermometer, super low tech and effective. The only thing is that I have to reset it every day to make sure that it does a reading to capture the highest and the lowest temperature during that 24 hour period. So I have been asked if I could improve my greenhouse, what kind of changes would I make? And I guess my answer would be just to make it bigger because who doesn't want a larger space to grow in and also just to enjoy like, this is really lovely and I'm loving this. Um, but the reason why I went with a smaller eight by 12 footprint is because we with that size, I did not need to get a permit from my city in order to put this structure on my property. So that's actually kind of the reason why, but who knows, maybe in the back garden, at some point I'll decide to put a larger greenhouse, who knows? Um, so this has been kind of like the tour for this sunny greenhouse. If you have any questions about this kit, this greenhouse or my setup, or if I've missed any details, let us know in the comments below and thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next video. I've got a little bit of greenhouse NVC in Chris's garden, but there might be a greenhouse next year here at the Epic Homestead. Until then, stay tuned, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.