Bed 16 & Climbing Greenhouse

The weather looked OK ish for this morning so I visited the allotment on the basis of even if it was an hour and a half I would get stuff done and move forward. Little and often is the mantra. Bed 16 was cleared of its planting membrane and it was cleaned and put by ready for relocating to the Sweetcorn bed for 2023.

Bed 16 after turning the soil with the blue claw in the top photograph. Lots of mares tail roots are in the bed that need to be weeded out at a future visit. 

Beetroots are going into this bed this year, so 105 hole planting membrane required and shallow netting hoops just to keep the wildlife off the bed.

The soil looks good even before the mares tail root extraction has taken place. It started to rain a little so I put the tools away ready to exit stage left and then as I was about to leave, the sun came out again and the rain stopped.

I decided that rather than get into weeding bed 16, I would sort out what was in the Greenhouse Frame Box 1.

I bought the two greenhouse frames from B&Q when they were getting rid of all their old stock a few years ago. Sold as seen and no guarantee that it was all there. I think I paid £5 each for them on the basis I could make a fruit cage or something out of them to support netting.

Turns out there there are bracket missing from the first box, so on a future visit I will look to see if the missing parts are in box 2.

The greenhouses aren't 1.8m x 1.8m (6ft x 6ft) they are 2.4m x 1.8m (8ft x 6 ft) and only just fits in the space I left for it. I placed two base frame sections down just to get the feel for how much space they will occupy.

I'm thinking I could just use the metal fencing panels as the walls and not as cladding fixed back to the greenhouse frame.

All the roof members are there, and in fact I have probably got twice as many roof joist when I take them out of Box 2, so I could infill between the joist I have shown above in yellow. 

Me being me I will find a use for the rest of the aluminium members, I do after all need to construct something to keep the squirrels off my sweetcorn.

The idea of this structure is to be able to grow climbing vegetables up the mesh panels and into the roof so that whatever I grow hangs down and I can just enter and harvest what's hanging easily.