The Greenhouse Odyssey: Four-For a New Beginning
By Lorraine Miller
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening
Unfurl yourself into grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will he home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
John O’Donohue
(Irish Poet 1956-2008)
(the last two stanzas)
I’m in the little house. Hoorah! It does have a bathroom. It has a kitchen, too. It’s nice. I can live here. But that’s not my goal. My goal is to build a greenhouse.
I conned a dear friend into helping me. Kirk worked on construction during the week and came to my place on the weekends. Stuppy was the greenhouse manufacturer, a brand many of my growers used. Once the Stuppy engineers had the greenhouse dimensions, 20’x80,’ they calculated all the necessary posts, purlin (horizontal pipe), bows (curved pipe), nuts and bolts, etc. operations were underway. The winter of 1978-79 was bitter cold. Our fingers froze to the pipes. The daytime temperatures in December and January rarely rose above freezing and every night, it plunged well below. Kirk and I bundled in thick parkas and mittens, cited the corners, and ran a string line to mark the location of 28 post holes, 10 on each side and 4 on each end, all 4’ deep. The ground was frozen solid. In case you’re a fast reader and skated past the last sentence; let me repeat, the ground was frozen solid. On weekdays, while Kirk was somewhere in the valley building apartments or some such, I dug post holes. My tools were a pair of gloves, a shovel, a posthole digger, a digging bar and several bags of charcoal briquets. Lighting small beds of briquets, I thawed the ground 6” or 7” deep, removed the softened soil, and put the briquets back in the hole. Inch by inch, foot by foot, the post holes were unearthed.
In the meantime, the greenhouse parts arrived on a flatbed from Kansas. I organized everything in the yard. Nothing was too heavy, but boy, what a lot of metal pipe.
On January 31, the temperature was -8. By mid-February, it was still freezing at night, but the daytime temperature soared to 35 or 40. Sakrete, a ready-mix concrete shouldn’t be poured when the temperature is below 50, but we had to do it. We couldn’t move forward until the posts were cemented in the ground. Kirk knew some tricks for pouring sakrete in frigid temperatures, and we used them all except the one that says ‘never do it.’ We used hot water and lots of straw for blanketing. We lay on our bellies and blew on it, prayed on it, and waved our arms and yelled at it. We got away with it. Try as one might, it’s impossible to handle a screw gun or a ratchet while wearing mittens but, frozen fingers aside, purlin upon bow, screw after bolt, rivet into fiberglass, a greenhouse was taking shape. Kirk, looking at me one morning with a big shit-eating grin on his face and an icicle hanging from the top of his nose, slapped his mittens together, and asked, “well, what problem are we going to solve today?” It was time to install the Modine hanging heater, which weighed almost 200 lbs. The instructions recommended renting a cherry picker or scaffolding to reach the 14’ peak. Rental fees were not in the budget, but, we did have rope. We jury-rigged a pulley system to hoist the heater. We stood on 'kissing ladders’ and heaved on the rope until the heater was high enough for me to connect it to the short chains we had previously attached. Our original plan called for me to stand on Kirk’s shoulders while I connected the chains, but this was a safer way. Kirk worried that while he was holding the 200 lb. heater in his arms and I was standing on his shoulders, he might start laughing or crying. Either way, we’d all come down.
Finally, the day came to put on the polyethylene or plastic roof. This may sound silly, but the roof and its installation must be done with care. It’s more than just a cover.
It provides critical insulation and when properly tinted, protection against sunburn. The roof is actually made of two layers of plastic. Once both layers are clamped on, a small hole is cut in the inside layer, and a blower fan is installed. The fan separates the layers with about 6” of ‘dead air’ space, which acts as insulation. The roof is strong enough to hold a heavy snow load, which provides further insulation. We began by rolling the first sheet alongside the greenhouse. Wadding up two adjacent corners, we cinched them with rope. We wadded up the middle of the edge and tied rope around that, too. Then we catapulted the loose end of the ropes over the metal frame. On the other side, we tugged the rope, hauling the plastic over the peak and down to the sidewall. The poly was heavy and difficult to get straight or square on both sides. If it’s not straight, it puckers as you clamp it down. We rolled out the second sheet, figuring it would be much easier to haul over the slick first layer. We were wadding up the corners to tie on the rope when a gust of wind came out of nowhere. It picked up my end of the plastic like the mainsail of a yacht. In a second, I was 15’ in the air and still rising.
Through the whirr of the wind, I heard Kirk yelling, “Let go. Let go.”
Despite the bumps and bruises, we finally got the roof on. It was a giant magnifying glass. Before any plants could go in, it had to be tinted and sprayed with greenhouse paint. To do this, I used a trombone sprayer. It’s kind of a trick of the eye. Its slide acts as a pump and has a ¼” tube that hangs in a 5-gallon bucket of white greenhouse paint. Standing as high as I could on the tallest ladder I could find, I aimed for the peak of the roof and pushed and pulled the slide. The paint was sucked up the tube and sprayed out the trumpet in the form of a splatter. Since the poly was slick, the paint ran off in long drips. The trombone kept clogging. The tube kept popping out of the bucket. A breeze came up and blew paint in my face and in my neighbor's swimming pool. But somehow, the job got done.
I imagine a trombone sprayer and the greenhouse paint in a horticultural museum today or in a museum of things that are an embarrassment to ideas.
By the middle of March, the greenhouse was ‘buttoned up.’ There was still plenty to do, but the building was finished. Temperatures were in the 50’s and sunset was late – 6:30! The ground was nothing but mud. Mud can be a sure reason for hope. Inside, it was warm and dry. When the sun was low in the west and shining through the fiberglass, I liked to sit at the back end.