Complimentary Blueberry Juice

It has been a few years since we began down a path that would lead us to a new greenhouse. As a full-time occupation, it became clear to us as Market Gardeners that the single item we were most sorely missing on the farm was a 3-season hoop-house-style greenhouse. We have a small greenhouse which is only set up for germinating and caring for seedlings, as well as curing garlic, onions and squashes. A 3-season greenhouse built directly over the topsoil allowing springtime produce availability and end-of-season extension would be a game-changer.

First we spent a year chasing a lot of fantasies…if you’re going to build a greenhouse why not go all-out! These fantasies of 4-season growing or solar panels for extra heating were awesome and very cool in their defense, but the ROI just wasn’t there. The further you want to extend your season in these climates, the more diminishing the returns are…not only from a business standpoint, but a growing one too: the colder it gets, the less light there is, and things take a lot longer to grow.

In the end we opted for the most simple design: a simple greenhouse with double poly built directly over the ground. The only feature we chose to include is an 18″ wall below ground with insulation to act as a frost barrier.

I will skip the most frustrating part (“public process” and “planning”) and go right to the moment of breaking ground just a couple days ago!

A small backhoe and laser level got us down to an incredibly even 18″ exactly below the surface. We applied gravel to the bottom and began building the wall/frost barrier.

After the wall is built, we will level the topsoil in the greenhouse (it slopes off to the north).

We will be able to start the 2025 growing season with a little extra oomf! We’ll see how that goes, as greenhosue growing will be all new to us, so I’m sure we’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way.

We only added irrigation to the property in 2019, and now we can’t imagine that we were able to farm at this scale without it. And with this new greenhouse, I’m sure we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t build one sooner.

It feels really good to add this crucial piece of infrastructure to the farm.

Graham

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