Happy May, everyone!

I trust you hadn't planted yet! Yikes...

Just peas, arugula, cress, some spinach, kale, etc.. All moderately frost tolerant, though they don't like being buried under too much snow.

It was all gone and sunny by afternoon, though still frigid here for this time of year.

The greenhouse is full of more tender stuff, and lots of now mature greens in shallow trays. This gives us fresh salad every day without leaving the house. One less reason to risk it at the shops.

Cheers

Wish we had time for a veg plot. Used to love it, just too busy with everything else. 2 days sewing up the cherry net, 2 days opening up the orchard rows so that my wife could get her tractor through, just goes on and on.

Is the greenhouse just single glazed? I am tempted to go for a solar greenhouse, we can build into a slope for thermal mass.

This 8'x16' one is attached to the South face of the house, with double-glazed glass on the sides/door, and 7-layer corrugated polycarbonate on the roof (to protect from ice/snow falling off the house roof).

The foundation is concrete and brick, no insulation except under the floor below a couple of feet of sand. There are three large steel barrels, painted black and filled with water for extra heat ballast.

There are two automatic roof vents, but I wish we had also thought to specify a side vent on the far wall from the photograph above, so it could get cross ventilation with the exterior door (behind the camera).

No heat source other than the Sun, or when we leave the glass door open between it and the home. It is usable for starting/growing things here from early March through June, and from September through the end of November. In the main summer months it can be used for large pots of chillis and other HEAT loving things, but it does get very hot even with the door pinned wide open.

Cheers

We used to have one of these:

https://www.kedergreenhouse.co.uk/smallholder-prod/4m-wide

4 x 8 mtrs with a sliding door one end and automatic "windows" on both long sides, you do need cross ventilation especially on a sunny S facing plot and the auto vents. Much better insulated than a glass greenhouse.

That's pretty cool, especially if (as you say) it has decent insulation.

I'm thinking of perhaps getting a couple of 8x12 glass houses, with doors at each end, to cover two of the main veg garden beds at some point. Or maybe just a much cheaper poly tunnel!

An extended growing season would be quite useful here, especially this year, where we're still getting -C temperatures every night.

Cheers

It's by no means super insulated but all the metalwork is inside and the material is like supersized bupplewrap so it used to lose heat in the evenings much more slowly than a traditional greenhouse or polytunnel. We'd still be harvesting chillies in November but obviously are winters are nothing like yours.

Way better ventilation than a polytunnel could ever have.

tanstaafl.

I've had a clearout in my office during lockdown, unearthed loads of Norton/Symantec CDs. Used to love the animated GIF of the Doc inspecting mt HDD

Wow. It's actually chilly here too, so...