Our greenhouse brings us fun, savings and profit.

Our greenhouse is one of the best investments we’ve ever made. For under $10,000 total investment, we got a 10’ x 16’ lean-to greenhouse. Besides adding 160 of delightful covered space, the greenhouse heats the house, cleans the air and helps us make money. It makes our house look better too!

Normally, when a person here in the high desert opens the front door on a clear January day, they expect a blast of cold air. That’s not true in our house.

If we open our front door on that clear day, the sun has heated the air in the greenhouse to close to 80 degrees, and all that free heat just rolls in all day. A good ceiling fan just inside the front door is all it takes to deliver the heat throughout the house. On sunny days, we do not need any other heat from mid-morning to late afternoon. This saves a lot of firewood and electricity. We’re putting less junk in the air.

I was concerned that the greenhouse might get too hot in the summer, but the exact opposite is true. With doors at both ends, it becomes a ventilated passageway. Removable curtains screen the south and east exposure. This keeps the direct sun off the stucco house. The greenhouse has actually improved cooling efficiency.

We grow and sell aromatic herbs as part of our business. The greenhouse allows us to winter over more sensitive herbs like rosemary and scented geraniums. It also provides summer shelter to the more sensitive herbs that cannot take the high desert sun. We heat the greenhouse only to prevent freezing, not to create rapid growing conditions. However, the greenhouse distributor also has everything necessary if we decide to expand the growing season or growing veggies in the winter.

Maybe the most delightful part of the greenhouse is the fragrant, warm air that wafts through the house when we open the door to the greenhouse in the morning. While all plants will increasing the oxygen in the house, some plants are better than others at also soaking up indoor air pollutants and processing them into fertilizer for the plant. We make a point of raising a lot of these air-cleaning plants in our greenhouse.

If you want to learn more about using houseplants for cleaning up the air in your house or office, a great hook is “How to Grow Fresh Air, 50 Houseplants that Purify your Home or Office”, Dr. Bill. Wolverton. Dr. Wolverton worked on the technology for cleaning the air in spacecraft and other small, very tightly sealed spaces. Boston ferns and peace lilies are good air purifiers, as are gerber daisies, palms and corn plants.

Construction of our greenhouse was a good two person job and assumes some basic skills. My husband teamed up with a professional carpenter to assemble and seal the greenhouse kit. The greenhouse is on its third winter. We continue to find it more and more valuable. It’s a sunroom. I hang the laundry there. It’s a great place to sit for a cup of tea with a friend or a book.
We are just getting to the point that we can calculate dollars saved and dollars earned because of the greenhouse. The payback already is excellent. In an uncertain economy, I am very pleased to have such a hard-working asset as our greenhouse.