A proper glass greenhouse for the garden can set you back anywhere from £400 to well over £1,000, but there are numerous cheaper options out there and many of them do the same thing at a fraction of that price. But do they last?
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00:00So today we're going to look at temporary greenhouses and whether they're worth the
00:19investment and the money you pay in our climate in Ireland.
00:24I have four that I'm going to show you.
00:26Ones from last year and just how they fared and this is a new one here.
00:32This is the biggest one I've ever put up and we'll show you inside it as well what I'm
00:38using it for.
00:39We're looking at here, this is my main greenhouse from last year and where is the cover you
00:44may ask?
00:45Well, gone with the wind basically.
00:48The thing about greenhouses with plastic covers is that we live in a very windy country so
00:56they don't last very long and if you are getting one I would say to maybe don't count it lasting
01:03more than a year or two.
01:04But the frames still have their uses, great for keeping plants off the ground and for
01:10hardening off as well.
01:11As you can see here I just got plastic trays, they put between the two shelves just so you
01:17can fit more on it and this makes it harder for slugs and snails to get at them as they're
01:23higher up and that so be able to reuse that one.
01:29We'll go around to the corner here to another one I put up and these are quite tall ones.
01:37This one as you can see is a bit ripped but most of the cover is still intact and again
01:43the wind just rips them apart here in Ireland but still very useful for the young seedlings
01:52and just getting them acclimatized to outdoors and just having that wee bit of open space
01:58too for any hardier plants you can just leave them outside.
02:03Then here was another one I did last year and this is a smaller greenhouse and as you
02:10can see it's in perfect condition.
02:12The height seems to make a difference, maybe where it is in the garden too, it's in a
02:15shifted spot but this has survived completely intact, no rips or anything on it.
02:22So if I was to get more this year I would go for the smaller type and they're far cheaper
02:28as well.
02:30And then I'll just show you, I've opened this greenhouse, this new one.
02:34This is twice the size of the big one I showed you there a month ago.
02:38As you can see what I did first was I put on some ground cover for it, I didn't do that
02:43last year properly and it was a bit messy, there was weeds growing up through the little
02:49cover I had on in the ground.
02:52This year I bought some stuff that's permeable so the rain can still get through so it doesn't
02:56become waterlogged and here I've just put double pegs down along it and it's holding
03:08up quite well, this is on a couple of weeks now.
03:11And then the actual ties that keep the greenhouse anchored to the ground, I've put the double
03:19pegs rather than the single peg that comes with it, put these plastic covers on first
03:27so to keep the pegs in place and then piled on stones then and rocks on top of that just
03:34to keep it, just to strengthen it a bit more, keep it anchored and then also inside the
03:40greenhouse just to stop it from flying away I have bricks on a few of the bottom metal
03:52rods here, just the frame of it, just again to keep it anchored.
03:59You can do that with pots or anything else as well, heavier pots, I'll just show you
04:04what I'm on here, what we have growing.
04:08So these are pansies, pansies and a wee stray California poppy seed here, a new Delia that's
04:17come up from seed, another tiny Delia and these were just potted up yesterday, these
04:25are all a variety of cornflower, a different kind of only but we'll see them and hopefully
04:39they should take off in the next few weeks.
04:41Here we have Rebecca, which is an annual version, black-eyed Susan, here's the stocks coming
04:50up and more pansies, a few more Delias grown from seed, just seed collected from the garden
05:00last year.
05:01Here we have carnations, young carnations, sweet pea slowly emerging from seeds collected
05:08last year.
05:09This is yarrow in between and down here more pansies, some snapdragons in the back, some
05:17echinacea and more Rebecca.
05:25This is a mixture of carnations and echinacea or purple cornflowers and here we have some
05:34annual scabies and also some echinops.
05:37Down along the bottom then we have some roses grown from seed, they're tiny still, some
05:46more calendula there, some rosemary I grew last year, a tiny little lavender in the back,
05:57more calendula and then these pots with nothing on them are winter squash.
06:04Over here we have some seeds we've recently sown, courgettes, purple broccoli, green broccoli
06:11just starting to sprout there.
06:14These are zycanthus and more echinacea, we have a lot of purple cornflowers this year,
06:23some perennial butterfly blue scabies and more Rebecca.
06:30Down here we have the blue cornflowers and the sultan virgin as well.
06:41So it fits quite a lot and here there's all the seeds we planted last week, nothing up
06:46yet, these are all older seeds, about 15 years old, just wanted to experiment to see if they
06:51come up as various types of vegetables and herbs in there.
06:56So that, as you can see, they do hold a lot, it means you can get the plants out of your
07:04house and one of the things I've done here to try and slug incinerate it a bit at least
07:10is I've put some carbophoil along the bottom rungs, along these bottom poles, just to make
07:21it a little harder for the bugs and snails to climb up and start eating the plants.
07:27So far so good, after about two weeks now, I don't see, here's one slug trail, so we've
07:38definitely had one visitor who's made it up.