Four: A Greenhouse is Built
Permit in hand, I asked a dear friend to help me build my first greenhouse. Stu had moved to Denver, so our mutual friend, Kirk, who worked in construction during the week, came to my place to help me on the weekends. Essentially, we were erecting what is called a hoop house or Quonset hut. Many of my California growers used a brand of greenhouse called Stuppy and, well, monkey see, monkey do. Once the Stuppy engineers had the dimensions (20 x 80 feet), they calculated all the necessary posts, purlins (horizontal pipes), bows (curved pipes), nuts, bolts and rivets. Construction was underway by January, just three weeks after I received the permit in the mail.
The winter of 1978–79 was bitter cold. Our fingers froze to the pipes. Daytime temperatures rarely rose above freezing, and every night it plunged well below. Kirk and I bundled up in heavy parkas and mittens. We kept a little fire burning and would occasionally go over to it and slap our mittens together. We sited the corners and ran a string line to mark the location of twenty-eight post holes, ten on each side and four on each end, all four feet deep. 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 my mittens, a shovel, a post hole digger, a digging bar, a Bic lighter, and several bags of charcoal briquets. Lighting small beds of briquets, I thawed the ground six or seven inches deep, removed the roasted soil, then 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 the Stuppy greenhouse company in Kansas. I organized everything in the yard. Nothing was too heavy, but boy, what a ton of pipe.
On January 31st, the temperature was minus eight degrees. By mid-February, it was still freezing at night, while daytime temperatures soared to thirty-five or forty. All the post holes were dug and it was time to cement them in. Sakrete, a ready-mix concrete, shouldn’t be poured when the temperature is below fifty, 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 every one of them except the first one—which was never, never do this. We mixed the Sakrete using hot water, and once it was poured in the hole, we blanketed it with thick layers of straw. Then we lay on our bellies and blew on it, prayed for it, waved our arms and yelled at it. It worked.
Try as one might, it’s impossible to handle a screw gun or a ratchet while wearing mittens, but frozen fingers aside, purlin upon post, bow upon purlin, bolt after screw, a greenhouse frame was taking shape. One bright morning, Kirk looked at me with a big grin on his face and an icicle hanging from the tip of his nose. He rubbed his mittens together and said, “What problem are we going to solve today?”
It was time to install the Modine hanging heater, which weighed almost two hundred pounds. The instructions recommended renting a cherry picker or scaffolding to reach the center of the purlin which was fourteen feet high. Rental fees were not in the budget but we did have rope. So, we jury-rigged a pulley system to hoist the heater. We stood on back-to-back 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 to a bow. Kirk held the weight of the heater on his back while I made the attachments as quickly as I could. Our original plan had called for me to stand on Kirk’s shoulders while I connected the chains, but Kirk worried that while he was holding the two-hundred-pound heater in his arms with me standing on his shoulders, he might start laughing or crying. Either way, we’d all fall down.
Finally, the day came to put on the polyethylene (plastic) roof. This may sound simple but it wasn’t. The roof must be put on with special care. It’s all too easy to drag the plastic across a bolt or a snag of sharp metal and rip a hole in it. And if it’s not put on straight, it bunches when it’s clamped down. The roof was actually two layers of plastic. Once you have both layers clamped on, a small hole is cut in the inside layer and a blower fan installed. The fan blows air between the layers and creates a six-inch “dead air” space, which acts as insulation. The roof was strong enough to hold a heavy snow load, which, surprisingly, provides further insulation. It could handle eighty mile-an-hour wind whip without tearing.
We began by unrolling the first sheet along the side of the greenhouse. Wadding up two adjacent corners, we cinched them with rope. We bunched up the middle of the edge and tied rope around that, too. Then we catapulted the loose ends of the ropes over the metal frame. On the other side, we tugged on the rope, hauling the plastic up and over the peak and down to the sidewall. The poly was heavy and difficult to get straight or square on both sides, but we did it. Then 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 fifteen feet in the air and still rising. Through the whirring of the wind, I heard Kirk yelling, “Let go! Let go!”
Despite the bumps and bruises, we finally got the roof on. It proved to be a giant magnifying glass and had to be properly tinted before any plants could go in, to protect them from sunburn. I had to coat the plastic with greenhouse paint. To do this, I used a trombone sprayer—a sprayer that literally looks just like a trombone. The slide acts as a pump and has a quarter-inch tube that hangs into a five-gallon bucket of white greenhouse paint. Standing as high as I could on the tallest ladder I could find, I aimed for the 14’ peak of the roof and pumped 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 splatter ran off in long drips. The trombone clogged. The tube popped out of the bucket. A breeze came up and blew paint in my face and in my neighbor’s swimming pool.
Now, I imagine a trombone sprayer and a bucket of greenhouse paint in a horticultural museum, the plaque turned towards the wall, an embarrassment to the inventor. I never did get the darn thing to work!
By the middle of March, the greenhouse was “buttoned up.” There was still plenty to do, but the building construction itself was finished. Outside temperatures were in the fifties and sunset was late—7:00 p.m.! The ground outside was nothing but mud. Surprisingly, mud can be a sure sign of hope, a forecast that warmer temperatures are coming. Inside the greenhouse, it was warm and dry. When the sun was low in the west and shining through the fiberglass end, I liked to sit on the wood framing at the back. For just a few minutes, everything glowed a brilliant pink and gold. I’d ask myself, is this a dream, or am I waking from a nightmare? What will the real world bring?