Greenhouse advice sought from SoCal, Southwestern folks

[estación seca]

Read read read read read
Think think think think think
Plan plan plan plan plan

[darby]

Planning, of course, yes. Although my problem tends to be that the more I ruminate on this kind of thing, the more likely I am to only see problems and talk myself out of the whole thing. It's probably better to just drink a lot of beer and solve problems as they arise...

A number of people here have very kindly offered to let me come tour their backyard greenhouses in the area--LA is very spread out, and various time constraints mean that I can't easily get to all of them, but I think this will answer a lot of my questions.

[Orchidbyte]

Hi, I tried all that stuff with my 6'x8' here in Los Angeles, the only way to grow with our hot and dry conditions is a swamp cooler, it will cost you 50.00 every two months of summer and it will do the job. Misters, foggers just keep things to wet, you have to have air flow, fans and a swamp cooler, under table misters that are linked to a irrigation valve to a multi program controller, can pick that up cheap at big box store.

I find that with my GH stuffed with 85 pots on table all in large chunk gravel, 135 mounted and normal plants in the ground under tables works great. i water entire GH once a week and feed all through year, will mist mounts every other day in heat.
I use 50% aluminet from Apr. - Oct., full sun no shading rest of year.

Installed a hot water line that I can mix with filtered water so I don't put freezing cold water on warm plants in morning. I just use a whole house filter system to water plants, seems to work fine, plants have excellent roots.

Below are pictures of GH when I cleaned it a few months ago, empty. with pots in and then with all mounts.

[estación seca]

Beautiful greenhouse, and great advice.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by estación seca

Beautiful greenhouse, and great advice.

X 2

[darby]

I want to mention that Orchidbyte very kindly invited me and the family over to see his greenhouse last month, which was extremely helpful (to me). Before the visit I was going back and forth between building a greenhouse or an orchidarium and now I'm definitely going greenhouse.

I still have a ton of details to work out but now I feel like it's actually do-able, whereas before I wasn't sure. It also helped to bring the family along because now they're enthusiastic about a GH too, and actually want it to be bigger than I originally planned...so, again, thank you, it was a big help.

[Ray]

The axioms of greenhouse growing:

1) When erecting a greenhouse, always go bigger.
2) It's already not big enough.

[darby]

Yeah, I can see that. Orchidbyte impressed on me that although his 6x8 obviously works well for his plants, it's not big enough for more than 1 person to squeeze inside at a time. I have enough room on my site to go 8-10' wide, 12' long.

[Roberta]

Originally Posted by darby

Yeah, I can see that. Orchidbyte impressed on me that although his 6x8 obviously works well for his plants, it's not big enough for more than 1 person to squeeze inside at a time. I have enough room on my site to go 8-10' wide, 12' long.

Also, go for height... give yourself room to hang things without needing to do gymnastics to get through the GH, because lots of things are especially happy when they can hang.

[darby]

Yeah, I can see that too. I'll definitely keep that in mind.

At this point I'm looking at pros/cons of a kit versus building a wooden (I assume cedar) frame, DIY. Annnnd I still need to figure out a foundation for my building-on-top-of-a-concrete-slab situation. All of the kits/plans I've found so far assume that you're working with a patch of bare earth, which I'm not...