A Greenish House

     My father started it. Last spring, about the time I was planting those first seeds and trying to resign myself to the fact that I'd have to revert to the bad old pre-greenhouse days of seed starting (check out spring posts and you'll see why sans-greenhouse is a challenge), he sent me some lovely greenhouse porn online. The options were tempting, and put the costs of house ownership bellow the $2000 price tag for the smallest of tunnels from Farm Tek. Still, I didn't have the capital to justify even a modest hobby house, and resolved to make do with cold frames (also documented in those March posts). Still, for some reason I didn't delete those tempting pictures and their alluring blue links to sites offering walk-in spring protection.
     By the end of summer, the Patient Spouse began delicately re-opening the question. "Where are you going to put your greenhouse," he inquired now and again throughout the hot days of August and early September—when, like the cricket in the fable, I was still fiddling away the summer as if all issues of seed starting and icy winds would never again be an issue.  As the leaves began to change, so did his tactics. Besides increasing the frequency of his gentle inquiry, he began to offer his spare time. Did I want help clearing out the garden? Would the greenhouse go here, or over there? How big was I thinking to make it? I stopped insisting that I was not, in fact, "Thinking to make it" any size at all, and began tentative, then aggressive, measuring, staking, and land clearing. "Is this where the greenhouse is going?" he asked, coming out one buggy October morning with gloves and a shovel to help dig grapevine. I realized I was talking siting, dimensions, visibilty to neighbors and proximity to water and electricity rather than denying the presence of a mental greenhouse. Like two separate people, I was the Scot with the $2000 profit and a copy of the Help Wanted section, and a farmer with startup capital of my own and a Muck Boot poised to step into my future.
     Land clearing is far more comforting than sitting down with the want ads. When the going gets (emotionally) tough and I can't really validate my abilities, it's by far easier to get outdoors and pull bittersweet roots than it is to think how I could have made it to the age of 46 without a stable career (fodder for another post someday). Through hot autumn, I cleared the swath from the squash bed to the Northwest corner of the property. The Patient Spouse helped level dirt, move rocks, and cut vines. While I hemmed and hawed over dimensions, measured materials and drew up rudimentary designs, he merely smiled and nodded. His smile puts the Mona Lisa's all to shame.

This is the spot, all cleared and more or less level, limited by the old boulder wall marking the West property boundary (greenery growing on it—parallel to neighbor's hedge), North boundary (thin white stick in background is the corner post), North edge of squash bed (post and wire in foreground) and a huge boulder after which land drops away. We had to dig out and move about 2' of soil down-slope to rocks in foreground to make a more or less level 10' X 20' pad. It's a long way from either the spigot or the rain barrel, which I'll surely regret, but this was the only place with flat ground, all-day sun and not needed for ag or access.
     The Patient Spouse looked at my rough, not-to-scale renderings of the greenhouse I could make for pretty much nothing out of existing lumber and an 8' X 100' roll of 6 mil poly bought for an earlier, failed attempt at a retrofit lean-to greenhouse. The width of the plastic ruled out making a hoop-style frame from either conduit or pvc pipe because there is no way to attach separate sheets over such a framework and keep the plastic "skin" airtight. Besides that, buying materials that would bend to hoop shape immediately meant a $200 investment in building materials, not including another $100-plus for greenhouse plastic of an appropriate width. It seemed easier to think in terms of an old-fashioned, frame-style house, using the existing salvaged 6 X 6 and 4 X 4 posts I had on hand, with a sturdy kicker board base and  top frame and some sort of roof... maybe 4 operable lights like I built for the cold frames. "Free"...or, mostly free... the term appeals to this farmer.
     Little did I know, the P.S. was biding his time. He had heard the words "of some sort" in that design of mine. I built. He went to work and earned an actual living wage for us. A rather exciting frame rose up from the dirt. Here it is.

     Meanwhile, the weather grew colder. A couple weeks back, we hiked in the mountains and saw the first of the snow under the trees. Oh, yeah: winter. Snow weight. We didn't have any snow at all last winter until March. But I saw that I had been deceiving myself. Those cold frame lights for the roof would have to be smaller, reinforced, and maybe all removable wasn't such an affordable idea. Either way, I'd be buying about $75 of welded-wire fence for inadequate reinforcement under the plastic, lots and lots of firring strips to build the frames and hold down the plastic, and 4 10' 2X4s to hold up my increasingly elaborate, no-longer-so-cheap roof. Use Palram plastic? Not for under $300. Use cattle panels in place of welded wire? Only available in useless dimensions for my increments-of-5 design. The Mona Lisa smile never left my man's face. I endeavored to persevere with my giant cold frame design for a few more days. Then I went back to those porn pics from Pop's.
In two weeks, for $100 shipping, I could have the kit for a complete $400 Shelter Logic tunnel frame (think "sheds snow") delivered to my door in 2 weeks. Dimensions? 10 X 20. How about that!
The P.S. let me use his laptop to place the order. He waited until I hit the "print purchase confirmation" button on Home Depot's friendly website (!Free Shipping!) before he said, seetly as ever,  "That was the right choice." I had to rough him up a little before he would even confess that he "Didn't want to say anything." Under no amount of wifely pressure would he utter the words "I told you so." He is a far better man than I, you know. End of part 1.

At the End of the Season

     October 14, the eve of my final farm market of the season, a white frost settled over the grass. It dimmed the zinnias, turned the marigolds to a faded amber drift, wrestled the tomatoes and peppers to limp black rags. Summer is over. For that final market, I offered vivid bouquets of variegated "Fish" peppers in all stages of ripeness, set amid the last of the dark red dahlias, fiery sprays of burning bush, plumed bronze miscanthus grasses and graceful Ruby Silk Looooove Grass. (It must be said that way, just as grits can never be ordered without a drawl.) Most of those bouquets came home with me. It was a better week to sell dried bunches of Japanese lanterns. Perhaps with the blaze of color everywhere around, nobody needs bouquets; we're living in one.
     The need for bouquets has been a bugaboo all summer. I was doing pretty well back in lilac season selling seven bunches at a market, I now realize. Back in May, even here in the country, shoppers must have been hungry for a little captive springtime to put on the dinner table. The start of the summer bloom season, however, coincided with a floral glut: buckets upon buckets of bouquets brought by the local BIG farm, which has a farmstand open seven days a week, a full greenhouse and bakery, and a presence at all the larger farm markets as well. My bouquets sold between the moment theirs sold out and the end of the market. Four bouquets per market is a good take. I had to learn to accept that and look away. My price was the same as Big Farm's, I really think my quality and overall loveliness was the same. I even invested in plastic sleeves like theirs, thinking the presentation might make impulse buying more inviting but the addition made no noticeable change in sales. The fact is, a tiny stand can't compete with a huge stand that offers one-stop shopping. If I'm going to sell flowers again next year, then it will have to be during the shoulder seasons, it won't include the sunflowers or glads other vendors have done so well with that I can't compete, and it will have to be with some niche flowers no one else has thought of. Maybe no flowers at all? What, then?
    Will there be a "next year" for First-Flower? During this month of Last Flowers, it's time to tally up the successes and failings of the spring and summer now past. Discounting major one-time gifts from family members, my first year's labors cost a grand total of $3,333.64. Most of that wasn't the kind of one-time expense I'd hoped; it was the cost of market fees, health department licenses, sugar and canning jars. That means these costs will be annual ones. There is no way to spend less. My total profit after expenses? $2,606.36. Not a living wage. Pretty humiliating, actually.
     And yet, the voice inside my head keeps scheming. Even as the Math Major tells me "Mom, you should look for a job" and her gainfully employed elder sister pounds the pavements looking for even more ways to make herself useful and rich, I'm mooning about, expanding garden space and looking up seed possibilities. There's a new greenhouse of sorts rising from the newly cleared tangle at the back of the property, and 100 mixed late tulips tucked among garlic cloves in the cutting beds. 100 mixed tall Dutch iris are setting down roots beside them. Three elderberries are rallying to make syrup-perfect flowers and fruit come spring. I'm happy when I'm out there in the dirt and the fresh fall air. That's where the math fades into the background, and all this labor makes perfect sense with no calculus needed. I may not have a job, but I have a livelihood. Bloom where you are planted!