First you began germinating Fig Marigolds, Hortensia, and Lavenders in your guest bedroom, during the winter, with a humidifier and fluorescent lamps. That summer, you’re turned on by the beauty and resilience of aquatic plants, so you convert your kids’ giant plastic pool to cultivate sacred purple and pink water lilies and lotuses, like the Nelumbo nucifera, symbolizing eternal life in Buddhism. Next, you want to create a delicious garden to grow exotic New Zealand yams, Jicamba, and Tamarillo tomatoes. Your wife is enamored of a green lifestyle as well, and suggests building a greenhouse, imagining all the rare and flamboyant floral gems to populate it.
Because moisture wreaks havoc on traditional building materials, wise contractors see building a greenhouse more like a boat than a frame house.
You start looking at pictures of them, at the Garden Club, in rare manufacturer’s catalogues from the turn-of-the-century. You marvel at the beauty of their designs and the ingenuity of their systems. Another Garden Club member points out their luminous, pitched rooflines, the slender cypress roof bars, all double-grooved to hold glass and collect condensation. You feel like you’ve just stumbled on a lost civilization. You want a green house just like the Victorian 19th-century marvel you see in the picture.
What Is It?
Greenhouses (a.k.a. glasshouses, hothouses, cold-frames) are structures covered with a transparent layer of plastic or glass, permitting sunshine to enter, while at the same time, maintaining a barrier from harsh environmental elements. For many plant lovers, they become like their own personal horticultural libraries. You can fill your greenhouse with the botanical wonders you’ve collected from a tropical rain forest in Brazil, cacti from American deserts, or the strange and beautiful Bandaragamas and Halapas you find surrounding Hikkaduwa temples in Sri Lanka.
If you possess all the skills of a draftsman, architect, engineer, carpenter, cabinetmaker, mason, welder, sheet-metal worker, mechanic, electrician, and glazier – you’ll probably want to design and build your greenhouse yourself. If you’re a normal human being, hire a green house contractor possessing these talents.
Who Needs a Greenhouse Contractor?
First-class greenhouse contractors are not cheap. For something modest, be prepared to write a check for $40,000. An outstanding greenhouse is far more complex than simply assembling a mail-order plastic and aluminum kit. They are complex interfaces of glass, iron, steel, copper, and wood, requiring fabrication, modification, and invention.
Use dictates design. If you need to be dry and snug out in your pajamas on a freezing winter night, you have only a few options. If you adapt your needs to the climate, you’ll have a happy relationship with your new greenhouse, and get a lot more space and style for your money. A solar greenhouse is inherently a balance of efficient heating and good growing since heat collection and orchids, ferns, and pipers have competing needs. To trap heat, a greenhouse needs to be sealed airtight with multiple glazing, solid framing, insulated walls, dark absorbing surfaces, and a perfectly pitched roof. Yet these are all features that can seriously reduce light. Plants demand loads of light, not to mention breezy ventilation and a humid atmosphere.
Because moisture wreaks havoc on traditional building materials, wise contractors see building a greenhouse more like a boat than a frame house. You don’t try and conquer the climate, you work with it. You live in the toasty solar collector, and dedicate the adjoining space to your plants.
Benefits
A top-notch greenhouse contractor will apprise you of all the principal decisions that you’ll face creating your favorite horticultural habitat.
For instance, you’ll have to decide on the covering of your greenhouse. Among the options are glass, polyethylene, and even fiberglass. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. The principal advantage of the polyhouse is that it’s far cheaper than a glasshouse. Also, with two layers of polyethylene, the polyhouse is also less expensive to heat. The downside is the light conditions of a polyhouse are less desirable than a glasshouse. The principal advantages of the glasshouse are the high level of light and the long life of glass. The solidness of glasshouses protects your plants in adverse weather conditions, too. For instance, a wet blizzard can cause your polyhouse to collapse atop your little beds of excruciatingly beautiful red roses.
Conscientious greenhouse contractors will also walk your through framing issues. Frames are made of wood, galvanized steel, or aluminum. (Build-it-yourself greenhouse plans often include plastic frames, which, in general, you want to steer away from.). Frames must match the style of the greenhouse and its unique engineering requirements. Do you want a Rigid-frame, a Quonset, or an A-frame?
Experienced greenhouse contractors will also clue you in to the structural details of end walls, and their usefulness in providing better insulation and protection against high winds. Cooling and ventilation systems are two other important components that will be high on his list. For instance, greenhouses need exhaust fans to exchange inside and outside air, equalizing temperatures within the growing space. Naturally, these systems also highlight the need to examine which power and utility sources will best match your new greenhouse, not only for ventilation, but also for all the water you’ll be using for irrigation, too. Flooring is another critical issue, not only in terms of choosing between, say, bare ground and gravel, but also determining whether you want to raise your plants on benches to more efficiently maintain temperature control.
Risks
In fact, many greenhouses don’t work out well because they’re poorly designed, poorly built, or constructed with the wrong materials. It’s crucial you’re well informed, know the design you want, and don’t become a victim of inflated expectations, trendy looks, and bargain-basement prices. Promises of magical solar spaces with giant red tomatoes and cozy year-round living in your pajamas are almost always bogus.
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