OK, we’re getting to the end of our cold climate greenhouse dive. For this next one, as very public gardeners, there’s only so much that we’re willing to hide behind the camera lens. At a certain point we need to just level with you and show you all how it is.
Our greenhouse provides us with year-round use. We don’t grow year-round, but we do use our greenhouse for storage of our gardening related gear. Whether it’s our container gardens, our pots & inserts, our reservoirs or our 1020 trays, these all have to go somewhere. For us, the “catch all” of pretty much anything garden related that can be outside is our greenhouse.
But, this presents some challenges in the spring where we’re not quite ready to deploy all the stuff we store in our greenhouse. Step one is moving everything out of our greenhouse to a temporary storage area. This allows us to use the greenhouse for our seedlings and other early plant growth like we’ve been discussing.
When the time is right, typically around our last frost, we’ll again convert our greenhouse into “summer mode” where the goal is to grow plants into fruition. But, this time is a bit awkward for us because we need to make an absolute disaster of a mess. We’ll probably organize this a bit more, but first the snow has to melt!
Every time we do this shuffle, we try to make mental notes of the maintenance we need to perform between now and “summer mode.” For example, we experienced a pretty good earthquake earlier this spring that resulted in some disruption and damage to our stored equipment and systems we use. Our greenhouse also desperately needs a cleaning, at least once it is dry. We’ve got a few other minor repairs, too. Spring is a great time for this maintenance!
So, if you’re doing something similar and wondering if you’re crazy, you’re not. As far northerners, we generally plan around how we spend 9 months out of the year and not those brief three months of summer. At a certain point, there’s a cost of having a large garden and sometimes that’s a disaster of a yard for a few weeks!
