Sorry for the delay, your comment came in while we were out of town. We noticed exactly the same discrepancy when we built. We went with the shorter measurements as they were far more sensible. I think what happened is that it was designed one way (probably by Ana), but upon building, it was realized what a waste of materials it would be. (e.g. 3 studs off a 2x4x8 vs. only 2, with a lot of waste) So, my guess is the OG plans are “structurally correct” and the discrepancies are corrections made without thought to the full consequence. I don’t think this ever got corrected properly and there wasn’t any “official” follow-up that we could ever find. We did get about a 1 inch gap above our door header due to this. We were able to fill it in, though, and also later insulated against it. So, it wasn’t super consequential.

Nice! You did all the things we wish we had! We’ve since acquired a Kubota, so one of these days we’ll pull it off the foundation and re-finish the groundwork. We’ve been tweaking this greenhouse for years now. For example, this year we installed foam panels in the lower vertical portion and also weather sealed the door. This gave us some pretty significant performance gains, along with the UV insulation. (But, the UV liner is the very best upgrade we’ve done as it really helps to retain the heat!) Thanks for sharing your experience. Hope you enjoy growing in it and you get tons of good produce out of it in coming years!

We don’t, unfortunately, and are unlikely to make one. Ana’s free plans are fairly sufficient to get the main structure up and ours is basically those plans to a “T” overall. I think it’s reasonable to go into any construction project with the idea that there may be some “overruns” and materials needed outside of what is specified. That’s true of houses, sheds and even greenhouses. The plans will get you almost all of the way there and you’ll have enough experience by the end of it to figure out the remaining things.

Thanks for the kind comment. We’ve had the greenhouse now for three summers, the stain is still holding up pretty well. It’s fairly protected under the plastic, so unlike home/deck stain, it will fade at a less rapid rate. At some point, yes, it will need to be re-done. We don’t yet know the time cycles, but we figure when we re-do the plastic, we’ll also reapply stain. I suspect that will be every 5-10 years, somewhere in there? For now, though, our stain and plastic is still holding up great, so probably closer to 10 years than 5.

For the ridge cap, yes, we just cut a piece of the plastic lengthwise and bent it over the top. (Which reminds me, I need to get a picture up of it! Thanks.) It’s quite flexible and easily folds over the greenhouse top. There are “proper” ridge caps you can buy that fit into the grooves of the greenhouse plastic, but these require a vertical installation of the plastic. We haven’t really had major issues with the plastic being installed horizontally, but I will still consider doing it vertical when we re-do the plastic. After a few years now, I don’t hate it being horizontal and it’s not causing major issues, so it’s likely fine to do it the way Ana recommends. (And also much, much easier to install!)

Good luck with your project, it was a fun build for us and is working very, very well!

Do you think the sun will fade your stain, or do you think you’ll need to reapply stain?

For your ridge cap, did you bend the plastic?

And would you still consider running the plastic vertical for better water runoff?

Thank you

Matt

Hi Christine! You can read a bit more on the bucket system here. We’ve also taken them one step further and centrally irrigated them via on off grid reservoir, here’s our how-to! Thanks for reading!

That’s great! Smart call on the tractor, especially for the expanded size! Your future self will thank you for it! Many climates can get away with a gravel foundation, but such things can be a little dicey up here due to frost heaves. Good luck with your build and thanks for checking us out!

You are welcome, we are glad you found it helpful! We do get a little bit of wind pushing the louvers open. Overall, we don’t find it to be a major issue that negatively affects the temperatures, so we haven’t been concerned with resolving it. If it was a major issue, you could likely place a board or foam panel over it with fairly simple rigging. It would be difficult to automate, though, and if that was the pursuit you would probably need “active” louvers that you could sync with the fans. Sounds like you’ve got a few more days left with the build. Good luck with everything, you’re in the home stretch now!

I really want to thank you for your awesome blog post and your thorough response to me. I just built ours using your model and Ana’s. I have it all framed and sided except the plastic panels. So far it has. taken five days. I bought the fans and back window louvers. that you recommended. Does wind ever push the louvers open unwantedly? Those are going in today.

You tomatoes look great. I really like your organization and then your grow list and planting management. Thank you so much for putting this out for us rookies to look at and think about doing.

Hi Holly! We actually did consider that and may still consider it. The biggest objection is there are very visible places it would have to go to get a proper seal. I’m concerned it would detract from visual appearance. Also, it would make replacing the greenhouse plastic (which does have to be done every once in awhile) a more difficult process. We are thinking about lining the inside with UV treated greenhouse plastic next spring to see how that goes. Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for your kind comments, Jeff! We built this in spring of 2020. We used it for the first time this year and it has been absolutely awesome! It seriously benefitted our tomato and pepper production, easily increasing our harvest at least 10 fold. We knew it would help us, but it was actually surprising how much better off our production was with this greenhouse.

The ridge cap we built was just a piece of the corrugated greenhouse plastic that we cut down to about 10 inches wide, or 5 total ridges. In this process, we figured out that we would have likely preferred to just use a full sheet as the ridge cap instead of cutting it down. This would have required two additional sheets to cover the whole top, though, so it would have increased costs.

As for “organization” if you will, we have three growing rows with two walkways, basically in a U shape. The outer walls have rows of plants and the center row has two rows of plants. We grow a lot of indeterminate tomatoes in here, so we can get away with tight plant spacing with vertical trellising.

We do need to update this post with our growing system and other information, hopefully we’ll get to that this winter. We built a fully irrigated system based on the GroBucket subirrigated bucket system. But, here are a couple of pictures of what we did this summer in the meantime!

I am very impressed with your greenhouse and the use of Ana White plans. Thanks. Jeff