This morning our goal was to progress as far as possible today on the greenhouse construction. The slab turned out very well and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have any problems there so we went to Hornbach (our version of Home Depot) this morning to buy the wood for the frame. We ordered the plastic sheeting for it online and it arrived earlier this week. So we decided to go to the Hornbach for almost everything else so we could get started on framing out the base and walls. At Hornbach we can look over every piece of lumber piece by piece which is actually a benefit over the local place, even though they’ll load it for us on the fork lift. But since we’re actually going to be seeing this wood on a regular basis, we want it to look relatively nice. We’ve come along nicely with the construction and already have two walls up…but that’s another post. I’m just going to focus on the shopping trip at the moment…

We got up pretty early morning and walked the dog. Then we were off to Hornbach for the wood. While we were there we stopped in the garden department to see if they had any cheap plastic pots that we can use to transplant the seedlings into. They’re outgrowing the mini greenhouse already and we unfortunately only have 10 pots that we found on close out. And one of our pots has already been eaten by the dog. Anyway, they didn’t have any pots like that but they did have some cool seeds. I picked up two kinds of carrots, early onions, celery, watermelon and giant pumpkin seeds. I thought one of the carrot seed packs was really cool because they had them on a paper tape so they were spaced out evenly.

Afterwards we headed to the lumber and loaded up all the wood for the greenhouse. It’s a good thing I drive a Defender with a really sturdy roof rack or we’d have to be looking into renting a trailer all the time. When we loaded the wood onto the truck in the parking lot, someone actually stopped in his Land Rover Discovery to tell us that he also has a Defender with a roof rack and he suggested getting a net to prevent wood from jumping out of the stack. Apparently he stopped short with a load on there and a piece shot out of the middle. But with the cinchers we used to secure that thing, we aren’t sure how that would be possible.

Sometime during our wood collection process I lost the cool carrot seeds. I was pretty bummed since I thought they were pretty ingenious (I’m a sucker, I know) and they were sweet carrots which I thought seemed really tasty. Perhaps with some buffalo wings and our fresh celery…yum. I hope that somewhere along the line they just fell off the stack of wood and we didn’t notice. I don’t actually want to believe that someone just came along, saw it and took them because they wanted them but I guess it could have happened…

While we were constructing the base of the greenhouse, we realized that we didn’t have screws long enough to screw threw the wooden beams into the concrete. And we didn’t have a drill bit that long either. So we took a trip to Hagebau, the home improvement store about 10 minutes drive from us. While there I couldn’t help but check if they had the carrot seeds I wanted to buy earlier. I ended up with seeds for another type on the tape and the sweet carrots from another company…but I’m still happy. In addition to the drill bits and screws, we also picked up the window hinges, door hinges and latches so we can actually secure the doors a bit. We figure getting something lockable would be pretty stupid when the thing is covered in plastic. And it seems unlikely that anyone would want to steal any of our plants anyway.

We’re relaxing a bit after the long day but we’ll write more about the construction of the greenhouse later. We have more to get done tomorrow but we have to keep it relatively quiet so it should be interesting.