Our first greenhouse!

As you may know I am a great admirer of my husband, Jonny Boy. When we first moved here, he did not have tons of experience when it came to construction or gardening and he did not have that many hobbies (that I knew about). Now that we have some land of our own (2.05 Acres). We have developed some hobbies that we really enjoy and we look forward to having a larger home with more space to do them...

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When we first moved to Nova Scotia we lived in my brother-in-law's house for a few months while Jonny was working on the ambulance. Then we moved to a little town named Stellarton near New Glasgow. We had a tiny apartment which I guess was the upstairs of a house that was turned into 3 apartments... It was very cute to start off our journey. Of course, we wanted to buy a house and not have to worry about a landlord. So we found a fixer upper. I think it was an impulsive move because we did not realize that renovations took so much work and money when you don't have the skill to do it all by yourself and have never done it before.

(The second picture is pretty bad, but that huge tree was blocking the house.  And we are also in the process of doing the siding on the shed too!

To my surprise, Jonny Boy almost completely renovated the entire house by himself. And he did a very good job! With some of my advice ;) And some help from friends... I will miss this house when we move one day, so now I try and enjoy the time we are still here and not always think of where I want to be...

One of Jonny boy's hobbies is gardening! He bought many books on different ways to grow a garden... We do not want to invest too much into this house and property because we don't want to have to move everything when we do move... This is the first year that we've built our own greenhouse. And it is very exciting to see that our vegetables are looking nice and green still in October while our squash outside is all wilted from the frost. I'm certain, in the years to come, we will perfect it. This is our trial year!

The norm is to start a garden right after the Spring's last frost (I think it's after Mothers Day). But we started ours pretty late because, for one, Nova-Scotia had a late frost and secondly, we did not have/take the time and were uncertain of how we were going to build it without it costing too much money...

We made it as cheap as possible and we love it!

Our friend had some old pallets that he gave us and we used a total of:

-12 or 13  pallets for the, tad bit, "red neck" greenhouse. 
-Six 10 foot long 3/4 inch PVC pipes for the arch
-1 1/2 inch PVC pipes cut into almost 6 inches each (to fit the 3/4 pipes in it on each end to secure them with screws.
-18 mm vapor  barrier left over from our house renovations.
-Screws
-Staples
-some 2X4 for the door and 1x4 strapping  (that we had already)

He cut every second board off the pallets east facing to let in more sun. And left the back of the greenhouse full pallets. And used 4 small tree trunks for the 4 corners and hammered them into the ground to keep the walls solid. 

All in all is cost us 40$ (with stuff we already had)

We planted tomatoes, peppers, and beans this year in the greenhouse. And strung them up with wire...(so they will climb the wire)

We didn't even have time to plant them in the ground.. the buckets were fine...

We also filled a big rain barrel with water so the sun would heat the water, and therefore keep the green house warm on cold nights!

We also planted a bunch more outside the greenhouse, but we think because the manure we used was too acidic (not old enough), nothing grew. (Only one plant made it, a 20 by 9 foot long acorn squash! We harvested 20 large ones! That's a lot of soup! I will have to share my squash recipes!!! )

Our future dreams are to live as self sustaining as possible. To "grow" our own meat and vegetables. God willing get a pig for meat and a cow and have our own milk and become like those real farmers who make everything themselves.  Yogurt,  cheese, bread, all that fun stuff... we're on a good start with our chickens I believe!

Jonny boy would love to sell our vegetables to a market or local restaurant and work from home that way. Now that sounds like fun to me! I think I could get used to that! ;)

Luke 16:10

"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much"

Ps: I will share more of his hobbies in future posts! :D