Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video series on Organic Gardening. In this clip, we are going to show you how to build a small, very inexpensive, mini greenhouse.
What we need to get is a little bit of drinking water pipe. This is simply a white PVC pipe. The size I prefer is one-half (1/2) inch diameter and that's the internal diameter of the pipe. It will say one-half (1/2) inch on it.
It comes straight in the store and you'll buy it in 10 foot lengths, maybe $2, $3, per pipe. And each 10 foot length is bent to make a hoop. And all we're going to do is simply take some of these pipes and bend them and insert them in the ground.
The first one is going to be sticking straight up in the air, and we'll push it down in the ground. If the soil is not soft enough, you could pound a stake into the ground, extract it and then put the pipe down in that hole. But our garden soil is fairly soft and this goes in quite easy.
So now we'll step over here, and shove this pipe in down here. The deeper you can insert the pipe, the sturdier your little greenhouse will be.
You can do this right over a garden bed, where you will be growing vegetables. So, this will be a cover to protect it from the frost and the cold night time temperatures. You could also do this right out in your lawn, in the grass and inside of here you could have little trays of seedlings to get them started.
So, we are just going to repeat this little process here, and we are making our mini greenhouse. Okay, there's the body of our green house. So, you can see it has already started to take shape. Now the simple plastic drop cloth, very inexpensive. This is what we will cover our greenhouse with.
So, to secure the long sides of your green house, we can take extra pieces of pipe and roll them up in the plastic until it's tight, and then pin them down with lots of these garden staples. The longer the better. And as these staples continue to rust, they will grip the soil with all those little rough edges, and keep this in place.
So, to secure each end, you could roll up another pipe in each end and pin it to the ground. You could leave one end of it open and clip it with those little clip ties, or some other way to secure it and just simply leave it open on the south end. This way it doesn't overheat in the day time and it creates a little micro climate in there.
And if its just frost at night, the frost won't get through to your plants, only a hard freeze will come inside here and kill your tender plants. So we can leave the south end of this open and just seal up the north end, or we can seal them both off in bad, cold weather.
Those are some ideas on how to put together a mini greenhouse. It doesn't cost very much, but can work very well.
Next, we are going to talk about how to give back to the soil, how to harvest your crops and some good resources.
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