Most of us only ever spring clean in the house – if at all – but as the new growing season begins, it’s equally important to make sure that your garden, and in particular, your greenhouse, are in order.
So last night, now that I’m getting home in the daylight, I headed out and dug over the plot to get rid of the weeds. I’ll leave it to settle for a few days and then plant the first of the onion sets at the back of the patch.
I also spent some time repairing the greenhouse. I’d joked in the past that it was probably only held together by the amount of moss on it, and it seems that those jokes may actually have been more truthful than I would have liked. I had cleaned all of the windows last weekend, and by this week, after it had spent seven days flexing gently in the strong winds we’ve been having, two of the roof panels had slid out, one by 10in and the other by more than a foot. I carefully slid them back into place and secured them with half a dozen nails hammered into the wooden frame.
The difference a couple of hours cleaning can make is amazing, though, and by my reckoning it’s probably improved the light capture in there by a good 10 – 20 percent, as the shameful before-and-after pictures will attest.
Before the clean you could barely see the plot through one side of the greenhouse.
Afterwards it was like you’d been given a new pair of specs.
Look at the same windows from the outside and you can see just how nasty it was.
The shameful thing is that cleaning it was actually very easy. All it took was a sponge on a pole and a bowl of soapy water. It should have been done years ago – by the previous owner before I bought the house – or at the very least last year, before I started using it to grow the tomatoes.
The net result should be a better crop of fruit this year. Greenhouses have no insulation, and so the more heat you can get into them during the day, the more the pots and slabs they contain will heat up, and the longer into the night the slow release of this heat will continue.
And from a personal standpoint, the greenhouse is now a far nicer place to be. It’s brighter and airier, and when you’re inside it you feel more connected to the garden without a thin wall of green between you and the trees. It makes summer feel just that little bit closer.
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