Greenhouse design and planting guide

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so today I thought I’d do one of my most frequently requested videos which is a guide to how I designed and how I’m using this greenhouse I did originally want the greenhouse where this lawn is a really big Greenhouse like to dominate The Garden but uh in negotiation with the kids they they really wanted to keep the lawn until at least the grandkids were all about 10 and that’s a long time to wait for Greenhouse so I decided to keep the lawn cuz it’s such a great play space and put the greenhouse where the old kids playhouse was so um I extended it a little bit so the playhouse I think was 8 be6 but it had a sort of verand on it so it probably was more like 8 by8 or something um and the greenhouse is 84 so let me sort of take you around and I’ll talk about the sort of design features so the first thing is how far away I decided to have it from the wall so I decided to have it 18 in away from the wall that made really nice easy access for maintenance of the wall and maintenance of the greenhouse you can get a ladder in there and all that sort of thing uh I’m really pleased I made that decision it did push the greenhouse out into the garden a little bit further than I’d like but overall it was a great decision and the secondary benefit was that it gives me a really nice kind of hidden storage area down the back of the greenhouse where I can put all my compost bags and things so that was the first thing second thing was I really wanted it on a uh a brick uh dwarf wall um I just part of that is just the Aesthetics I just really like the way that these dwarf walls look although mine’s a bit salty at the moment um because obviously the Greenhouse isn’t very old and the dwarf wall is not very old either um so yeah so I just really like that but there’s quite a few advantages I think to a dwarf wall one is it kind of hides a lot of mess you’ll see when we go inside the greenhouse that underneath the bench the trestle table there there’s a lot of mess and it’s all completely hidden by the dwarf wall which is really nice um second thing I think keeps things a little bit warmer and uh yeah it and it sort of strengthens the structure of the greenhouse quite a bit I think um there’s less greenhouse frame more nice solid wall and uh overall I’m just really happy with that decision so the actual Greenhouse itself is from the greenhouse people and the model is Royale and you can see that I chose this anite gray um I partly chose that because also last year we had all these uh Garden buildings built and um we chose anite gray for all the detailing on those the gutters and the uh doors and the um down pipes and all that sort of things so it just matches in really nicely but I also just think it really makes the contrast between the structure of the greenhouse and the plants inside the greenhouse really pop uh the Aesthetics of these things is really important to me because I’ve got no visual memory at all so I’m very much in the real world because if I close my eyes I’ve got no ability to visualize anything about the world so yeah Aesthetics are super important um and one of the nice things is greenhouse people they have these shelves as well which are color matched uh aluminium shelves and they’re really nice as well I’m very happy with those so outside other features I’ve got four roof fence of which three are working that one isn’t working so I need to get a new cylinder for that one from the greenhouse people cuz it’s still under guarantee um and I’ve got three lvas and those features are really useful because these roof vents are automatic venting so if it’s a if I leave home early in the morning when it’s too um cold to open the doors I can just put those these Loop open a little bit and just leave the roof vents to open uh later on in the day say it’s sort of 9 or 10:00 when it warms up enough and uh it just moderates the greenhouse temperature until I can sort of get home maybe midday or something like that and then I’ll open the doors up and all that and obviously when we get to Sumer have the doors and everything open all the time I chose two double doors and the reason that I did that is because from my experience of having apolog it’s really difficult to keep a greenhouse or a polyany cool enough in summer um in fact it’s pretty difficult to keep it cool enough in spring so opening up these double doors at both ends gives a nice free flow of air all the way through and these louvers and the roof rence and everything all help so I’m hoping that I can get the temperature sort of moderated and it just gives me nice easy access from both sides uh I’m going to put a little path down here as well and I’ve got a nice little patio here really nice and sheltered where I can sort of stage plants as they’re sort of gradually moving out of the greenhouse uh into the the outside of the kitchen garden and I’ve got a staging area down at that end as well uh where I’ve got my little hardening off bench and things as well so yeah gutters integrated but actually I’m not using them because I don’t want to Cluster the garden up with water storage because I’ve got water storage on the house roof and the house roof is huge by comparison with the greenhouse roof so um I can easily capture enough rainwater off the house roof I don’t really need to worry about uh capturing off the greenhouse roof but if you want that then that’s also a nice feature so let’s take a look inside so let’s start the floor so I decided to have um Indian Sandstone Paving and that is partly because I’ve got Indian sanso Paving everywhere else uh on the patios so it just sort of matches in with those and but the other reason is obviously the water just soaks straight through Indian sandstone and obviously there’s a lot of water in here partly because greenhous is leak a little bit uh also obviously you’ve got a lot of plants in here so you’re watering a lot there’s basically just a lot of water hitting this uh Indian sandstone and there’s no accumulation it just as soon as it hits it just soaks straight through and that is a big bonus by comparison with concrete for example um so pretty happy with the floor I do have this kind of central Runner here uh which is these sort of tiles um and these are kind of just a foam sort of tile that I’ve got down the middle and that’s because I’m just in here a lot Barefoot um all my socks and it’s just nice a surface to walk on and then underneath here uh I’ve got let me just take this off I’ve got a drainage uh channel here so if I’m washing the greenhouse down completely which I probably will be in October um and you know there’s a lot of water too much perhaps to soak through the floor then I can brush it into this Center uh Gully it’s just an open bottom trench full of Pebbles so that has worked pretty well so far so next up let me talk about yeah the shelves so the shelves are really nice they’re from the greenhouse people they’re expensive um but I am in a fortunate position that I’ve been able to fund this greenhouse for my YouTube channel and uh so you know money wasn’t quite as much of a constraint as it would have been otherwise um but I really like them they strengthened the structure of the greenhouse up quite nicely really stiffen it up and they uh obviously had a huge amount of space so Greenhouse is 14t long so I’ve got 28t of shelving and to be honest without that I just wouldn’t have been able to cope so that’s been really nice and of course up here we’ve got a lot it’s all box section this greenhouse it’s really nice and strong and obviously in these box sections you can put all sorts of different clips and hooks and things like that so I’ve got hooks for the strawberries and uh hooks for these Tomatoes um and I can hang them from these strengthening bars as well uh there just loads of places basically to hang stuff and there’s lots of little hooks and things you can buy like those up there uh you can put to put wires up to to uh train things like cucumbers and beans and things as well so I really like that I really want this roof to be sort of full of greenery in summer so um yeah I’m very pleased with the Box structure and the ability to put all those sorts of hooks in I’ll show you actually a few of the little hooks and things that I’m using and next down you can see I’ve got grow lights in here so the grow lights hang from the shelves very conveniently and grows are pretty expensive but what I did was I just bought this whole part from this one I think all these big um grow lights have bought them secondhand off eBay as a Job Lot and they were so cheap I think there were seconds from uh sort of commercial Greenhouse operation or something like that and all of them had like little issues uh with them uh some of which have been able to resolve and some have just resolved on their own and some of them just ignored um but yeah they’ve been really nice and it’s been a real bonus especially in Winter to be able to recreate basically the growing conditions of a different season so basically I’m sort of transferring no not transferring um making the plants think that they’re in spring when they’re actually growing in Winter which is surprisingly economical to do and so far it hasn’t cost me anything to run the grow lights that hasn’t been covered easily by the harvests that the grow lights have enabled and the secondary benefit of having these grow lights in here is at nighttime when these grow lights are on this green house looks stunning yeah it really makes a difference to sort of be out here working or just looking out from the conservatory or the kitchen out at the Garden when the greenhouse is all lit up it makes those ding G winter nights seem so much more bearable so yeah that’s been really nice and they on uh raise lower uh adjusters and things like that so right now they’re close to the top setting but they can be lowered down quite a lot so what’s next then so next down are the bits I built and I Debbie and I built this trestle table and the benches so there’s two benches and one big trestle table we kind of designed this so that we can pull this trestle table into the middle and use it for big sort of family dining events our house we can only get eight people around our kitchen table so when we’ve got 14 people here uh which we often do a few times a year we can clear all this stuff out a lot of it goes up onto these shelves some of it goes out on the patio pull this out takes about an hour and then we’ve got the two uh benches for people to sit on we actually had uh boxing day um lunch and dinner in here and it was lovely really lovely just this little heater down here which I’ll talk about later kept it toasty warm and yeah we had a really lovely day happens to be my birthday um so that was really nice plus there’s loads of space in here so intentionally I’ve got loads of space CU I’ve got my comfy chair in here and i’ got another comfy chair there it’s just really nice to sit out here and have have plenty of space so I’m intending to keep lots of space in here it’s just nice to be working in here when you’re not tripping over yourself uh but also just nice to chill out so let me just talk about this trestle table for a minute so it doesn’t go to the end so it’s only 10t long so that leaves 2 foot at each end and I’ve been using these ends quite effectively I think so here had a peach tree and an apricot tree there outside on the patio now I’ve now got French beans and cucumbers there and at that end I had peas and again those peas are now outside and I’ve got cetes in the corners and the Cucumber again and then um so I’m intending to do sort of similar things always growing things in these Corners that require the height uh probably in summer when these cetes go outside I’ll probably have melons in here here for example and uh yeah I’m just really excited about the possibilities of growing stuff in the corners and the little benches that are built slot underneath the trestle table and they make shelves and you can see down here that I’ve got loads and loads of storage shelves here uh and as kind of um shelves I’m using the these big uh drip trays gravel trays uh and so they just pull out makes it really easy to access them and uh yeah and so that if I want this more space I can take that um little bench there and slide it underneath here uh or I can pull this out and get access to another bench and grow on that other bench if I wanted to um so it’s just really flexible I’m very happy with that it took us um one day uh probably about 6 hours to make the trestle table and the benches and uh it was a really little little project to do together and yeah we so we really enjoyed it so I highly recommend making your own um on this bench here over winter that’s where I had all my Lett uses down here uh and then once the Lett uses were done uh I switched to potatoes and once the potatoes were outside or in the in the Pol as they are now I switched to peppers and tomatoes and up here where I currently got all of these beautiful strawberries and all of these uh lovely Tomatoes I also had lots of lettuces in these hanging baskets over winter so I’ve used the space up here quite effectively I think and I’m intending to do s similar thing in Autumn so growing things like Asian Greens in autumn in the hanging baskets and then lettuces later on and I will probably try and keep some Tomatoes going as well later into the season and I’ve also got some uh day neutral strawberries coming as well see if I can keep strawberries going in this greenhouse for a long time so what else design features so I have got this little heater here uh which I’ve been really happy with apart from this thermostat control thermostatic control blew up on one of them the first one that I got and so it still works fine it’s just the thermostat doesn’t work anymore so I’ve got it at that end there and they use that one as a fan and use this one as a heater and this can very easily keep the greenhouse frost free no matter how cold it gets here so even when it was like – 10 outside I could keep it frost free fairly cost effectively um and most of the stuff that I grow in here over winter doesn’t matter a light frosts is not going to hurt it even a medium Frost isn’t going to hurt it but it will stunt the growth and so I did really notice a substantial Improvement in growth just by keeping it just above uh freezing in here and uh right now I’m keeping it so from the middle of April uh until probably early May I’m trying to keep it about sort of 10° centigrade and uh that just makes it so much easier with the peppers and the tomatoes and the Cucumbers uh and all of that sort of thing and earlier on in the season I kept it frost free uh for all of the potatoes and things that I’ve grown in here so this video forms the introduction basically to my design and growing guide for green houses uh which is one of the chapters in my ebook so if you want loads more details about the sort of why of the decisions that I took like why did I choose electric heaters why did I choose uh smart plugs uh why did I choose to have grow lights in here how do I do ventilation uh and you know keep um disease sort of pressure low in here how do I heat when do I heat and all that sort of thing what do I sew in here uh for in each of the seasons and all of that all that detail is in this uh chapter of the e book so I do sort of recommend take a look at that if you want to know more so my name is Steve this is the seaside kitchen Garden analment Channel and I’ll see you soon