Hi all,

Hope everyone is safe and well.

As some of you know, we fenced off part of the front garden to give us a larger area of back garden. In an earlier post we used this area to build a poly-tunnel and place it ready for us to try and grow in a greenhouse.

However from the very windy winter we had here in the UK, the poly-tunnel was blown away and damaged beyond repair.

This left that area as a dumping ground for our general waste, our pallets that we use for building and other items that we had, that we would use in the future, mostly it was a place for stored firewood.

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After that happened, we had a good long think of how we were going to continue with this area and how best to utilise the area. We came to the decision that we wanted to have a greenhouse still and have a shed built to store our gardening equipment and timber, that we still had to use and clear out the garage, which in time, will become my workshop and preservative storage space.

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We bought an aluminium greenhouse, with polycarbonate panels instead of glass for the safety aspect and also the cheaper option. 

We measured and marked out the area it was to be located, we had bought a six by eight foot greenhouse, which did not come with a base section. This I solved by using four by four fence post’s which I’d cut to size not realising that the greenhouse itself would be bigger than advertised. So I needed to cut smaller pieces so the total area was longer and wider inside the base pieces. To protect the base I used the Japanese technique of burning the outside faces.

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Once the greenhouse was built, this took us two afternoons in the winter cold and rain. It was frustrating due to the fact that the instructions were pretty poor and was basically a 3D jigsaw (Good job Kiera has a lot of patience with me HaHa). The greenhouse was placed onto the base and screwed down.

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For a couple of nights the polycarbonate panels blew out due to the flexibility of the panes. I cured this with silver duck tape down the edges and as of yet, they haven’t blown out.

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Inside the greenhouse we put down a membrane to prevent unwelcome weeds and grass growth, and on top of that small sized white stone. I built Kiera a potting table so she could now sow her seeds and raise her seedlings before replanting in the raised beds outside.

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This left us with enough space to then buy a six by eight foot shed, which again we put together that also took us a couple of days to build. I again used four by four fencing posts for the shed to sit on, an again protected them using the Japanese burning technique.

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The space is pretty much full now with a small area in which I would like to build a log store frame with roof and three sides. For now it keeps our pallets in one place.

We will continue to update you as we go, for now stay safe, stay well.

Tony and Kiera.