Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today we are skinning a greenhouse
one of the four greenhouses we have on the property here now by skinning i mean placing
a plastic skin over the frame of the greenhouse and the plastic that i've chosen this time is
a white poly i want to talk about why i did that i have three other greenhouses that have
a clear poly on them and they pick up a lot of heat and a lot of light very very quickly this
house i wanted to have the white poly on it so that i could get a little bit more shade and i
can grow a different range of plants with at least one of my four greenhouses it may also be a little
more useful for propagation when sometimes the early cuttings don't need quite so much light
and the white poly does tend to last a little bit longer i want to show you how i'm doing this i'm
not going to take you through the entire process because i'm not sure how many people are out there
looking to see how to skin their greenhouse or want a more specific video than that
but i want to go through just a couple of the quick considerations as i get going here
so you can see i've already placed the poly onto the end wall here and i want to first
highlight the attachment here the attachment is done by something called wiggle wire
and i'm going to get you a close-up to show you how that's installed and the nice thing about
wiggle wire as a fastener is that it doesn't put any holes in anything so it's easy to
remove make an adjustment and then put back into the channel afterwards so you can see here
that that's the channel underneath and if i wanted to just tighten up the poly if i found
that it was a bit of a loose fit i can just put some pressure down below this and then re-lock it
nice and easy to apply
now i start with the ends here because the ends degrade less often than the skin on the major
frame of the structure itself so when we change the poly in a couple of years it might be even
up to five or six years uh i can probably get through leaving the skin on the ends whereas
when i change the one on the main frame here so that's why i've done this first because when you
fasten it on you're going to fasten the outside over top of of this here so that's one thing so
i just wanted to talk about some of the things i had to do in preparation for this first of all
the frame was already here and you know like i say i have four greenhouses on the property but
this is the first time i'm skinning this one here when i looked at doing it i had to look and see
you can see my beautiful shadow there i had to look and see whether the frame at the base there
the wood at the base was rotted or not in this case there was some rot on at least one of the
sections so i had to remove that one and replace it and then reinstall that channel second thing
i had to do was make sure that i have the material so we went out and bought the poly and some people
are going to ask me where do you get your poly well we bought it from cy growers which is a local
supplier of of greenhouse equipment and supplies of course there are three other suppliers you can
buy from locally here and it will be different in your location so that's something you'll have to
look up yourself i chose as i say the white poly because of its shading qualities and because it
will last a little bit longer and that is the poly and i had to choose you have to measure actually
you know what will fit over the top of the structure so you have to take a string and run
it from that bottom corner over here all the way across the top and then down to the other side to
give them a width of this roll of poly i also had to make sure that i gave them enough length that
we could cut off from the ends and then install the ends here first so as i say we we wiggle wire
that all in and we just did this section here and then we wiggle wire or we we applied the
poly straight across and then we had to trim the poly and you can see that the wiggle wire
there's a little excess sitting out there i'm gonna actually come back with a wire cutter
and cut off the extra wire or the extra springs as they stick out on the ends there because we
don't want them whipping around in the wind and cutting it so the tricky part that's to
come and i probably will not show this because well it's going to be a bit of a hard process
with just a few hands so we have to pull this all over the top of the peak there
and roll it out and then secure it down to the sides i'll show you after i've done that
but the concern there is wind if we get just a little bit of breeze on a big sheet of plastic
like that it can carry a lot of weight away with it here we are now with the poly pulled over the
top of the tunnel here and this can be really really tricky if you're doing it on a windy day
thank goodness today turned out to be a little bit calm and it was just a combination of
rolling out the poly beside and outside of the greenhouse and then just using ladders
and multiple hands to pull it over so the next step would be and this will be on the outside
is to take that wiggle wire and then lock down the poly to the frame of the greenhouse you see
even just the slightest wind ends up carrying this thing so i better hurry up and go do that
there it is all stretched over the top and now pinned in with that wiggle wire across the base
and on all sides we did a quick job of it because i'm starting to feel some wind come up here
and we don't want to leave it unsecured during that time but the next thing we're going to do
is unpin the ends and then stretch it a little bit to get the slack out of this you don't want the
greenhouse to be totally tight but you don't want to be loose to the point where
the pulley is flapping in and out with the wind either that just puts more wear and tear
on it just going to show you here obviously we've done the end as well
we'll be cutting out the poly at the door there getting towards the final touches here
we've installed a roll up side on the north edge of the greenhouse so what i have here is a long
pipe we've rolled the bottom edge of the poly on this side around that pipe and then i can crank it
up just like that for ventilation now you'll notice that this piece here is actually a pretty
simple mechanism for doing it but it has its downsides too if it comes loose it can actually
roll down very very quickly and hurt your hand so i've actually bought this here which is going
to need a pole installed here for installation but what this does is it cranks it so that it's
held in place and not just subject to slipping and falling and hurting your wrist which has happened
to me so we'll be installing that uh shortly and i may do a quick update video on that after i've
done this main installation here the only step that remains now that we've installed this bottom
edge this pole for ventilation is that right across here there's i don't know if you can
see it on the video there's another piece for channel lock here so this will just be
the final piece that secures the center of this just so that this edge can't flip up with the wind
here it is all tightly secured to the frame this is more or less ready for winter the only last
concern i have is if that roll-up side were to swing out in the wind it could do some damage
to the structure so there are some metal stays that i can install on the outside of the frame
just to keep that roll upside from swinging out i will secure that before the winter
total timeline on the project is one day preferably not a windy day and two to three hands
if you can get them two to three people if you can get them will make the job a lot easier now
i wanna talk a little bit about the benefits of a structure like this because obviously
you're not gonna take something of this size on this one's 95 feet long and i think it's 20
20 feet wide and if you're going to take on something like this which isn't even that big
of a paulie house but it's still thousands of dollars and so if you're trying to justify
how you would fit that into that biz into your business i want to talk about that a little bit
so even if you have the time even if you have the money even if you have the space you have
to compare this to what it would look like just to grow those plants in an outdoor bed all of
the benefits of a greenhouse or a polytunnel like this can be expressed in terms of control of the
environment extra control of the environment so if you want to have an earlier start to your season
you can close it up trap some heat and honestly that's one of the big benefits for me is that
i'm able to push my season earlier now if you're working in a northern temperate climate like mine
and you're in the nursery business typically you're looking at a peak of your
sales in late april going through may and into june but the problem is that the end of that
season is kind of arbitrary and i find rather abrupt customers lose interest all at once the
front end of that season i usually have eager gardeners pushing me for availability of plants
all the way through the front half of april and even into march i find people are quite interested
and if i had plants ready for them or if i have the plants at least waking up if i can push them
to that then i'll have something to sell and i can extend my season by two weeks three weeks a month
in some cases in fact in terms of getting my plants started early in the season if i
brought in bare root perennials or if i'm trying to get a boost to my roses i can actually get them
budding out and leafing out in an environment like this at the end of february i can do potting at
the end of february and that can give me you know a month of head start of growing time and really
get those plants beefy and ready for the early half of the season rather than waiting until
you know march and april to start your potting here our last frost date is at the end of april
now obviously this will not protect tender plants so if you're trying to grow you know hot peppers
you wouldn't put them in here in the end of february because this is an unheated greenhouse
but certainly for things like my roses any perennials shrubs trees
all of those will benefit from the early wake up that happens in an environment
like this i mentioned the protection from uh you know precipitation well obviously
you know excess rain if you don't want it early in the season we get lots of rain here
you know having your plants waterlogged after potting that's no good if you have hail well
obviously see what hale can do to mark up the leaves of a plants early on in the season so
that protection is there but even later in the season when you want to cool it off a little bit
you get the extra ventilation in here you can even string shade across the top of the house
when you get to the propagation season or the early part of the propagation season i want
to start my propagating of roses in say early june and it can still be a little bit you know
fluctuating of temperature in the early early june night temperatures can be a little bit low here so
that can set back your cuttings if you're an environment like this you have a house that
you can control that a little bit with and you get better stability of temperature and
that really is the advantage of a big growing space like this compared to smaller greenhouses
and obviously not everybody can afford a bigger growing space like this but the truth is they
are far more temperature stable and there's good mathematical reasons for that that i could explain
uh separately but it really does it's striking when you have a small greenhouse one of the little
backyard greenhouses that might be you know six feet wide and six feet tall and eight feet long
and if you leave that in the sun for any length of time the temperature in there will just skyrocket
up and then as soon as the sun turns off at night it will crash down you get very little temperature
stability in a smaller structure a big thing like this you get that temperature stability over day
and night not perfectly of course but you do get a better shoulder of your day and your night and and
you do get the advantages of that in the growth of your plants other advantages it gives you a
controlled working area you know pleasant outside of the rain where you can do your potting and you
can also get more control over the environment like if you cover the floor with ground cloth
you're working on benches you get to exclude things like weeds you can't really exclude the
pests unfortunately but you do get a better chance to spray for them if that's something you're
willing to do inside an environment like this compared to what you would be doing outdoors so
overall i guess everything boils down to you get more control and more control gives you more
decisions you can make over your crops rather than just letting the weather do what it does to your
plants the advantage of the extended season is probably the strongest financial argument for this
and i'll leave it at that all right thanks so much for watching today as i talked about
installing a greenhouse and the reasons why you might want to do so
and if you have any questions about this drop them in the comments below the video