AKA: “Susan’s Greenhouse.”
We live in Downeast Maine: That’s along the seacoast; way up near the Canadian border.
Strong “Nor’easters” and heavy snowfall during the winter (most of the year) necessitate a heavy-duty design for any sort of greenhouse. Standard designs work to various degrees, but seem to ultimately fail when we get our most powerful storms.
I searched for stronger greenhouse design ideas on the internet and discovered a Youtube contributor; “LDSPrepper.” He had been influenced by someone else and shared a heavy duty greenhouse design he modified to fit his needs. I simply did the same. My design uses many of the concepts from LDSPrepper’s design, but modified to match our unique weather conditions.
Our greenhouse is 10′ x 20′ and has doors at each end. There is a walkway straight down the middle with beds on each side. The roof ribs are 3/4″ PVC electrical conduit, spaced 12″ apart on center.
The garden beds are not typical beds, but are actually “Hugelkulturs” (You can “Google” this to see what they are all about). We discovered the combination of greenhouse and hugelkultur here in Downeast Maine where there is a very short growing season, made our vegetables grow like they were on steroids!
We’ve had this greenhouse up now for the past couple of growing seasons and it has exceeded our expectations; in standing up to weather, and in it’s performance of growing veggies & extending our growing season. Here is the drawing I used to build ours in a pdf file. It’s not heavily detailed as it was not necessary for me. It was just a guide for me to follow during construction, but it may help if you wish to build one yourself:
You can also visit my wife’s blog ( http://www.downeastthunderfarm.com ) to see more pictures of this greenhouse, and of some veggies she’s grown in it.
