Time for a Change... of Greenhouses

Eleven years ago, my Rion "Prestige" greenhouse kit arrived in a bunch of big rattly boxes. Looking at these photos gives me PTSD. I would never, ever, ever attempt to build my own greenhouse from a kit again, now, or ever.  But that's just me. Maybe you're more kit-oriented. Maybe there are better kits than this. Lord, there have to be. Oh, what I didn't know in this joyful moment...My greenhouse kit is here, yaaay!

In the photo you can see me standing in the humble circular imprint of my first greenhouse, which was called the Garden Pod. I loved that thing. It was tiny, but well-insulated and strong,  and I enjoyed it hugely from 2010-2012. I can't get over just how small it was. I could span it with my arms outstretched!

I used that little phone booth as well as anyone could. Man, did I cram the plants into it! It was my tiny she-shed before anyone came up with the terms.

I might still have it today, but a derecho (straight line windstorm) hit July 4 2012, and a mulberry tree fell on it and went boom. Got back from a hard week at Hog Island, Maine, to utter devastation. Luckily, there were no plants in it; it was just a winter retreat for us all. I knew I needed a greenhouse before winter came. Having experienced the mood lift, I knew I wouldn't make it through another Mid Ohio Valley winter without a greenhouse of some description.

Enter the Rion "Prestige" plastic greenhouse.  It was what I could afford at the time. You can see that fall is well in progress here!

Here I am studying the instructions, which had no words. Yep. No words at all. Just pictures, and arrows, and lines, and letters, and numbers. Saves on translating, I guess. The kit was from Israel.

It took Bill and me about six weeks to put it together, though the friendly lady on the phone said we could do it on "a good Saturday." Mmm-hmm. That would be SOME Saturday, with a crew of 12 rocket scientists.

I know I saw Part A-16 in here SOMEWHERE. Lookit th' Bacon settin' in the corner below...

Sheesh, the Prestige wasn't all that much bigger than the Pod, as I look at the Pod's imprint on the slab! 

I got four corners and a little roof height out of it. 

In the end,  I got ten years of use out of the Rion Prestige. Which, considering the quality of the materials and the janky kit construction, is astonishing. By the fourth winter, I was taping the plastic panels in place with clear Gorilla Tape. Each fall I'd rip it off, wash the plastic panels as best I could, and put fresh tape on. God, what an awful job that was, putting a ladder up on the creaking, groaning side of the Groanhouse, trying not to fall through the roof, but if I didn't do that, the panels would blow out. It happened once in a windstorm on a frigid January evening. All the heat just flew out of there, leaving my plants shivering and dying. I had to empty it immediately and fix the panel the next morning. Thank God I was home at the time. Talk about scrambling...

Ever buy 12 rolls of clear Gorilla Tape? Don't. 

What's wrong with this picture? EVERYTHING. Snow on the ground and a pane out of the Groanhouse. January, 2014. I've hauled everything but the rosemary Christmas tree out of there.

I could go on about the periodic greenhouse freezes, but y'all have been there with me. Still, in the wash, joy prevailed, and I knew I had to have a Real Greenhouse. The Rion Prestige helped get me through what I hope will be looked back on as the hardest decade of my life. And so for that, I most humbly and grumpily thank the Groanhouse.

By late winter 2023, I knew the panels wouldn't make it through another season. I could see the sky through pencil-sized holes in several of them. The frame sagged and all the rubber weatherstrip had worked its way out and couldn't be forced back in. I could hardly keep it warm with two gas heaters when the temperature dropped to the 20's, so I was in the habit of emptying the damn thing every time the mercury dropped below 20. Bringing all those plants into the house was SuCh a DrAg. 

After a decade of THAT, I'm more than ready for a real greenhouse!

To be continued...

don't y'all love a cliffhanger?

 

Wasn't That a Mighty Storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning

Wasn't that a mighty storm

Blew the people all away.

This Tom Rush song has been one of my anthems since Saturday, June 30.  I sing it over and over, just that couplet, as I work. On Friday we were in Bremen, Maine, and I was romping around a butterfly meadow with our new teenaged friends Corey and Ben and Hunter and Jetta and Saphire, among others.

The weather was doing this:

 I had just seen two life butterflies on the same daisy plant--a Northern Crescent and a Harris' Checkerspot, and Corey had identified them for me, and I was about as thrilled and happy as I get. 

Let's do some thrilled and happy:

My life Northern Crescent.

My life Harris' Checkerspot.

Two life butterflies on the same plant. Wow.

I didn't know it, but at the same time I was so thrilled and happy, a storm was brewing up along the shore of Lake Michigan and it had big plans for the Upper Midwest. It would travel down from northwest to southeast at 90 miles an hour, with what was essentially a brief, violent, several hundred mile wide linear hurricane (technically a derecho, with violent straight-line winds) and it would wipe out trees and power lines and pieces of homes; it would remove roofs and topple whatever was in its way from Michigan to Virginia. Which was considerable.

We couldn't get cell reception on the island and of course there were no televisions or newspapers or radios which is the whole point of a place like Hog Island so we were innocent of what was happening to our home. The storm hit our home at 6:27 pm Friday, June 30. That's when the Poll Parrot clock in the kitchen stopped. Saturday morning we finally came off island and got a cell message from our dear housesitter Monica who, now that Charlie Macaw is gone, just stops in to feed the turtles and fish and water the bonsais. And all she said was, "This is Monica. Please call me."

That didn't sound good to me. That sounded like something that's so bad you can't say it over the phone. So while we were waiting on our breakfast in a little cafe in Damariscotta, surrounded by hundreds of pounds of luggage and our tired kids, I called and Monica said, "Oh Julie. There was a horrible storm, but your house is OK. Your house is OK and I don't know how to tell you this but your greenhouse is gone."

And she started crying.

I didn't cry but this fast reel of images started flashing across my mind, gathered over the twelve or so years I'd been enjoying that little greenhouse. Images of it stuffed to capacity in April, waiting to be emptied of its fecund treasure.

Images of neat pots of the geraniums I love most and always say I can't live without: Frank Headley, with his icy white leaf edges and salmon single blooms. Grey Sprite. Rosina Read. Little various abutilons and mallows and cacti and whatever. As long as it has a bloom and will thrive in that small sunny space, it had a home with me.

Apparently, it helps to be pink to be included in Zick's Roster of Favorite Plants. 

I look at these images, taken over the last decade, and remember how the greenhouse healed me. How I could suddenly get that winter lump in my throat and just get up and march down and clear the ice away and kick the cinder block aside and open that door and enter a humid, peaty, fragrant little room of salvation. There was really only room enough for one person in there. 

You didn't need any more than one person in there. One person and her plants.

I never opened the door without saying, "Hello, ladies!" It was the plants that made the place, the plants and the sun and the warmth all winter and the smell of gardenia, jasmine and heliotrope when a temperate Ohioan had no right to be smelling those things. The eye-hurting magenta blooms of bougainvillea in January. Luxuries which became necessities.

Now, I always emptied the Pod by May 1 and planted everything out in planters and baskets. So nothing was inside it but some baker's racks and a little gas heater. 

Which is a good thing because that storm I told you about blew my Pod to smithereens.

 Took the mulberry tree while it was at it.

 And took about a third off Liam's willow, which is only twelve but is one hell of a piece of biomass. Even a third of it took us all morning to cut up and pile and clear away. Now you can see right into the tree. I wholeheartedly approve of this piece of surgery. It's always been full of birds and now we can actually see them, and the part that would have eventually broken off and fallen onto our house is gone. So for that I thank the storm, that mighty, heartless storm.

I think differently about trees close to the house now. I don't ever want trees close to the house, not big ones. That's another reason to love birches. They don't get big enough to ruin much when they come down.

                               

We cleaned up the bits of Pod and had to throw away the frame and footers, they were so badly twisted. The ceiling was smashed, so all we have are the sides, and we aren't sure what we should do with those. It seems to me that any kind of frame we'd try to build around a geodesic dome would be more than a couple of bird writers could engineer. So there it lies, in a neat stack next to a silent, powerless house. The Garden Pod was a prototype that never went into production, so there's no hope of finding the manufacturer and getting a replacement frame. It's shot, kaput, blown away. Someone with more brains and time than we have could probably build something using the walls, which are nice double thermopane plastic. Oh, it was a beautiful greenhouse. If you're out there, make yourself known. We've no room to store something we can't use.

We're ending our sixth day without power, breaking our previous outage record of five days. I'm sitting in a town park composing this post, waiting for the scissorgrinder cicadas to start their evening song. It's cooler here than in the house. The incessant heat brings on a kind of lassitude and eventually a mild despair that is a strong deterrent to blogging, hence the silence. Besides, there is a lot of work to do in the aftermath of a storm. We're tired.

We started throwing food away last Sunday morning and I was still at it the evening of July 4. The last to be cleaned out was the huge chest freezer in the basement. Everything had to be thrown away.  I documented it in a series of artful photos. I call this Cornish Hens, Mango, Potstickers and Seafood Blend.

And I call this Nine Degrees of Suppuration.

  At the end of the second day of cleaning it out, I decommissioned the chest freezer right then and there. By the time I had sopped up all the reeking frozen bird juice and blueberry and popsicle drippings in the bottom, by the time I'd disinfected every surface, I had decided to make it a suitcase storage unit instead of a vault where good food goes to die. Lord knows we have suitcases to store. They don't stay unpacked for long. I mean to change that. When you're gone all the time, these things tend to happen.

So I alternate between singing Mighty Storm and Pieces of April, an old classic by David Gates and Bread which came to me as we were picking up pieces of my greenhouse. The subconscious is a beautiful thing.

So was the Garden Pod.

The Pleasure Dome

The garden pod is at its best right now. Everything is in full bloom and ready for transplanting outdoors. I've repotted them all so they won't have to slow down for having cramped roots. The poet's jasmine is in full bloom again; the huge gardenia standard with the braided trunk burst open two days ago. After a dreadful winter of aphids and spider mite and whitefly, the insect forces have finally succumbed to a manageable level. Pyrethrins don't work at all for me any more; the insects chortle and frolic as they bathe and breaststroke in insecticide. More effective is organic clove and thyme oil, and it makes the greenhouse smell delightful when the spices mingle with gardenia and jasmine. But better than that is cold water, sprayed on the undersides of the leaves where pests hide. So simple, so beneficial, so nonpoisonous. Once I got the hose hooked up things started looking up for all my plants.

I love going down to the greenhouse to clip and prune and tidy things up, to water and sniff and breathe and banish the bad guys. Bill bought the little thermopane dome at a garden show years ago; it was a prototype display model that never went into production. Pity that. I count the Garden Pod as the best (material) gift anyone's ever given me. If you've always wanted a little greenhouse, just....DO IT. You only live once.

Bill took some nighttime photos of me in the greenhouse, reveling in out-of-season blossoms and fragrance, that bring to mind Coleridge's Kubla Khan, which I excerpt here, minus its second stanza which is all about war:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!...

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves:

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 't would win me

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

that's the huge poet's jasmine bush at my feet. Now imagine that with hundreds of blossoms, all stinkin' up the night air...all dome photos by Bill Thompson III

A Room Crammed with Summer

The Rex begonia "Looking Glass," from Ohio's own Glasshouse Works. Well, I got a plant there about five years ago, and this is probably its great-great-great-great-great grandchild.


It's only 9' across, maybe 12' high, not a lot bigger than a phone booth, but there is no other 9 x 12' space on the planet that brings me as much happiness as the Garden Pod.

I am a sentimental sort and seeing my plant friends die with the frost undoes me, even as I know I cannot haul them all inside for the winter. They wouldn't like it, I wouldn't like it, and the bugs would love it. If you scrutinize the photo above, you will see that I made an exception for the huge pot of Fuchsia "Gartenmeister Bonstedt" on the greenhouse floor. I just could not let it die. Later on in the winter, when it's loaded with whitefly, I'll leave it out in the snow for the polar bears, and nurture the two cuttings, already blooming, I've got going. But for now, it's got a home. This was the only plant I found for sale in 2008, and I found it many miles from my home near Dayton, and carried it over in the greenhouse. I didn't find it in '09, which mystifies me, since it is, in my and the hummingbirds' opinion, the best fuchsia in the universe. I have just finished a painting of it, in fact.

So I take cuttings in August and sometimes I take cuttings in October if the first August batch didn't root. My garden friend Nancy turned me on to vermiculite as a cutting medium and boy, what a difference. Vermiculite is free of the myriad molds and bacteria that plague potting soil, so cuttings have a fighting chance of throwing out roots before they rot. Everything I tried to root in the last October cutting harvest succeeded! Uh oh. I am definitely going to run out of room this winter. Here's one of the geranium cutting groups:
Who needs a 10-foot high red mandevilla, loaded with aphids, when you can start a little cutting like this one?
How dear of it to bloom. The nondescript looking plant in the white pot below it is the world's tiniest fuchsia, which just burst into teeny pink bloom today. Its flowers are no longer than a grain of rice, but perfect and sweet. It is a fussy plant that likes the greenhouse best. It threatens and threatens to die all summer long, as fuchsias will, and burgeons as soon as it gets in the moist heat of the Pod.

Abutilon megapotamicum, a mallow from Africa that I love. All my cuttings rooted, uh oh. Big plant. Better be giving some away.

Geranium "Bolton," developed in a town next door to sister Barbara's in Massachusetts.
One of two variegated bougainvilleas, zany plants that sulk outdoors all summer (not hot enough!) and bloom like crazy all winter in the greenhouse. Just when I need them most!
A new hibiscus, one I saw at the grocery store late this summer and snapped up like a horticultural crocodile. Now I need a big ol' hibiscus like a hole in the head but that COLOR. Please. Tangerine. Never seen it before, hadda have it. I do love my mallows.

It makes me smile and holler. Meanwhile, Mary Alice the hibiscus tree is taller than I am, with a 2" thick trunk, and she's in the living room. A cutting of Mary Alice is blooming for the first time today in the greenhouse. Nancy rooted it for me, in case Mary Alice goes south. And so it goes, on and on. Plants are banks of precious DNA, which you can split off and propagate and downsize and start over indefinitely. That's one of the reasons I find gardening so satisfying.

It's probably illegal to propagate this brand-spanking new tangerine hibiscus. No kidding, plant growers are patenting everything as they bring it out. Pah. I am a notorious scofflaw where plant propagation is concerned. Come and get me, lock me up. A plant this good should be spread around.

Time to water! Gotta go! Nothing like a warm, humid greenhouse on a dreary winter day. If you've even been thinking about getting yourself one, just do it. And you, too, can face the first frost without dread, and cackle when you open the door on your little room crammed full of summer.

The Lucky Day

I know. It's been a long time since I posted Chet. Here's a fresh picture for you, of Chetty at the top of the tower stairs, hoping to get a lift down. You may be sure he got both a kiss and a lift, a hug and a squeeze. He saves me every day, my little carved ebony lovepuppy.

I woke up at 3:30 AM yesterday morning, and my nasty old brain revved right up and said GET GOING YOU HAVE WORK TO DO and my body said WAAAAH WHY WHY WHY and my brain answered JUST BE GLAD IT'S NOT 2:30 I COULD DO THAT, YOU KNOW! AND NEXT TIME I JUST MIGHT! HERE, HAVE SOME MORE HORMONES SOME ESPECIALLY CRAZY ONES!

Can you just stop with the hormones? I am a sane, productive person trapped in the body of a cackling madwoman. Trying to claw my way out of this pod.

So I stayed up for five more hours, to get Bill off to Boston and Phoebe on the bus at 6 AM and Liam on the bus at 7:45 and I fed everybody and made sure they had all their stuff and at 8:30 I crawled back into bed supposedly to edit my manuscript but we all know that lying in bed with a couple of pounds of paper on one's chest is the surest soporific there is. The sun was streaming in on my face and Chet was warm and satiny and snoring gently by my side and my arm was draped over him and two hours just flew away while the world waited and life got better. Bluebirds were chattering and singing outside the whole time.

When I woke up I went out into the greenhouse which I had filled up for the winter only the day before

and I gazed at my plants and breathed and was thankful for this wonder, this best gift ever, this little summer-crammed room, saving my soul even as things are dying outside

for those big shrubs on the top shelf are gardenia and poet's jasmine, the things I need to survive winter...and oh I must take some heliotrope cuttings today!! I always forget!

There are hibiscus and begonia

and many geranium cuttings, rooted and just waiting to burgeon. There is lobelia seeded into every pot, already abloom. So we will have plenty of whitefly this winter.

And I walked out into the backyard and saw a bird hopping on the ground and thought, that doesn't seem right, that it should hop like that with me nearby...
so I drew closer and darned if it wasn't a male bluebird who couldn't fly.

He scuttled into the grass and hid silently but I dug him out for his exam.

and he proved to be surely the fattest most beautiful bluebird on the planet. From the shrill of his voice when I picked him up I could tell he was born this year, perhaps on our place. His wings check out, no breaks or even bruises and he's fat as butter but he can't fly so I will give him food and time and love.
and later on when he's rested up and trying his wings, a screened flight tent and we will see what all that does for him.

His two companions keep circling the yard looking for him and calling and calling. They saw me catch him and take him inside and I swear they followed me around the yard all day, calling disconsolately. I told them I'd get him back to them as soon as I could.

It was a lucky day all around. Lucky for him, lucky for me.

Emptying the Greenhouse

Oh, the greenhouse was crammed. And the weather predictions were for upper 80's and low 90's over the weekend. Yiiikes. I was not about to allow all the plants I'd been growing all winter to be fried. Ever since the fan broke in my greenhouse, I've been trying to get it emptied and planted out before it gets really hot. I hated the drone of that fan anyway, and if it's hot enough for it to be running, it's too hot for the plants. At least that was my rationale for not having somebody come out to install a new fan. So I had the devil chasing me to get the Pod emptied before the big heat hit.

I have to say I was as pleased with my plants this year as any. I was a good girl and pinched back the geraniums instead of letting them all get huge. I toughened my stance on bringing in big huge pots of flowers from the yard. It would only be cuttings this year. And I didn't go nuts--just one or two cuttings of each.

One difference this year from others is that I switched from giving liquid fertilizer (Peter's, dissolved in water) to Osmocote, which is fertilizer bound up in round, time-release pellets. You mix it into the soil and it does its work steadily and slowly as the months go by. What a difference. Instead of the huge spurts of top-heavy growth, I got slow, steady, sturdy growth in my plants.

Gartenmeister fuschia, the first time I've grown a decent specimen indoors. Yay!

Heliotrope, which smells like cherry pie. It's now out in the flower border. Rabbits don't like it. Yay again.

The poet's jasmine loves Osmocote. It was looking sickly and yellow, and Osmocote and some pyrethrins brought it back from Red Spider Miteland. It has a heavy, musky scent all its own. I crave it. And it blooms year 'round. What a dinkum plantie.


These are the geraniums I can't live without: star geraniums in red and hot pink, little bitty Grey Sprite, Occold Shield with its chestnut-splotched chartreuse leaves, Vancouver Centennial with its chestnut star-shaped leaves edged in chartreuse; Rosina Read in pink, Wilhelm Langguth with its white-bordered leaves, Frank Headley with its ridiculously white leaves and salmon flowers. The list goes on. At one time I had 28 varieties of miniature and dwarf and fancy-leaved gerania. They are my weakness. Well, one of my weaknesses. People of passion have many weaknesses.

But now it was time for them to go back out in the big world.
And so I planted them in nine planters and five baskets, all to keep them out of the reach of wabbits. Wabbits are huge geranium fans. They like them so much they chew them into tiny bits, leaving a neat pile of leaves and stem chunks where once there was a plant. Leaving me jumping up and down, firing my sixguns fruitlessly in the air like Yosemite Sam.

So what's a geranium freak to do? Why, elevate them, of course. You're never going to get rid of rabbits. The really precious plants go in hanging baskets, and the rest in planters, which are themselves elevated to about 18 inches, which is high enough to deter all but climbing rabbits (and they sometimes do climb to get to them). RRRRRR. Chet Baker. Where are you when they are doing that?
Sleeping? Cooling my tummeh in the green grass? I do not know. Rabbits are crafty. They do it at night, when I am asleep in my Jedd Bed. That's what I think. You cannot blame me for what the bunnehs do, Mether.

Here is my HotPot, with a red star geranium (so called because the leaves and flowers are like pointy stars), Occold Shield, and Vancouver Centennial. I put it next to the cool Bird Spa, and get photos of warblers in the crazy foliage. By September, Vancouver Centennial will look like a chestnut and chartreuse waterfall over the whole pot.
And here's the Cool Pot in the shade of a birch, with Gartenmeister fuchsia and a pink and purple fuchsia I love. Other than having to spray them with pyrethrins or insecticidal soap every couple of days for whitefly, I like growing fuchsias. Once they go outside, I don't have to spray them any more, nor do I want to, because the hummingbirds are visiting then.


You can see the elevational element in all my plantings. Of necessity. I'd love to have planters right on the ground, but then there would be no plants in them. And forget planting geraniums right in the ground around here. Gone, overnight. Good thing I like planting in containers, huh?


Mary Alice, my giant hibiscus tree, was made into a standard by rabbits, who ate every bit of foliage they could reach.
She's too tall now for rabbits, and the spicebush swallowtails love her so much.
I'm forever carving away at this miniature Ficus benjamina "Too Little." It's waist high to me now, and it's easier to keep the scale under control on a small tree. Still and all, scale and ficus go together like white and rice. They're awfully sticky plants, with all the scale pee dropping from them. Bleh. Still, it makes a very nice miniature tree. I guess it qualifies as a tropical bonsai at this point.


Phoebe got this jade tree as a tiny cutting from her first grade teacher, Mr. Jennings. Marty's gone now, cut down in his prime by cancer, but Marty the jade tree, and our loving memories of him, live on. He was an amazing teacher, a loving disciplinarian, and he taught those first graders to read in nothing flat.

That's an awful big jade tree, six years later. Chet can stand in Marty's shade.

Speaking of trees, I've trained a little gardenia into a great big standard with a braided trunk.
Every stem tip has a flower bud. It killed me to keep pinching it back to keep its nice round shape, and it ticked the plant off to have its new growth continually pinched off, and I knew as I did it I was preventing the possibility of flowers, and I haven't smelt a gardenia flower since way last summer, but... when this thing finally bursts into bloom after a year of pinching and training it will all be worth it. Woo!

Meanwhile, the bonsais are all potted up and leafing out beautifully. I gave them a huge root pruning this spring, which always gets them going strong.


My favorite. Or one of them. A Japanese maple, perfect subject for bonsai. This one, in the pot 25 years. A coon knocked it off the deck and split its trunk in 1993. I thought it would die, but I taped it together with electrician's tape and hoped for the best. This is the glorious result. I suppose I owe that coon.

The tree comes up to about mid-thigh on me, just FYI.


The bleeding heart has expanded beautifully. Bill indulged in some little solar lamps that delight us all out of proportion to their cost. We love to sit out in lawnchairs and watch them come on, just as the whip-poor-wills start to sing. Nepeta "Walker's Low" and King Alfred daffies. Too bad I don't have cats, that catnip is rampant. (But I don't miss them ).

I hope you've enjoyed this little tour of my gardens, container and otherwise. They make me feel alive.