Sui and I had talked about getting a greenhouse for years, as her primary hobby is gardening. We’ve got collections of plants under solar lights and crammed by windows inside the house, and every year we drag out dozens of plants in the spring and back in for the fall, but had nothing outdoors to extend the growing season. Finally, Sui found an inexpensive greenhouse on-line and decided it was time.



On a sunny fall day in mid November, 2010...



It is packed with plants. We pull in a lot of the semi-hardy plants from the outdoor gardens and start propagating new plants for the garden railroad for the next spring.



The North wall has insulation on it to keep the greenhouse a bit warmer and also reflect the sunlight back to the plants. You can see numerous containers painted black that hold water, providing some heat and thermal mass during winter.








Solar Power... in more than the obvious way

The small plastic box on the shelf holds the monitoring system which is connected to the house network via WiFI. Every 5 minutes, MRTG uses SNMP to grab the current temperature and humidity and graphs it for us. The white tube hanging on the left is the temp/humidity sensor. The black/silver thing on the right is the WiFi antenna and parabolic reflector aimed back at the house. The shed in the background has a solar panel on top which charges a battery, and that supplies power to the monitoring system.