1/5/11
It’s January, and so I am rebuilding a wrecked greenhouse. It’s an event that comes around every January, not unlike President’s Day or the Super Bowl. Though with considerably less hoopla.
The priority is what we call the long greenhouse, the 20 by 100 baby plant greenhouse I inherited from a neighbor some years ago. It was crushed by the great Christmas snow of ’09, and has laid scattered across the front field ever since. I’ve sorted through the mess and come up with a 20 by 60 ish structure, sort of straight and sort of plumb, that will be serviceable once there’s some plastic on it.
After that the perennial greenhouse, the pitched roof one made out of old well pipe, needs quite a bit of attention, meaning a bit of structural reinforcement and new plastic over the top. It may have to make due with new plastic on the sides and nothing else.
Fate may not allow me to do anything else this year. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to cover the big growing greenhouse. That’s the one that sat in my neighbor’s field for a few years and has stood, in skeletal form, in the lower field since the year before last. Yes, it needs plastic, too. And some purlins and some cross braces …. Then it will be ready to grow tomatoes.
Then there’s the propagation greenhouse, the one with the stone tables and the radiant table heat. That one is still a few years from completion, especially since I’ve diverted stones from that one to going to the new floor for the house. But more on that later.
The point of all this is that the new year brings with it greenhouse work, and greenhouses, like the new year, bring a sense of rebirth, resurgence and resurrection. They start barren and devoid of fruit, cold and sterile, seemingly unable to ever stay warm and get green. Sometimes they lay scattered about in pieces. Sometimes they are several years worth of building blocks that have not yet taken recognizable shape. Yet the bare dirt with-in soon warms and sprouts seeds. One barely remembers the emptiness of just a short time before. They become lush and green and provide plenty to eat.
That’s hardly news. The message here is that after the green, after the bounty, they get torn apart by wind, placed asunder by snow. They rot and collapse. They sink in the mud. They fall victim to apocalypse. Then, and here’s the thing, you get to put them back together again. And again.
That’s the true meaning of all the pieces of greenhouse I have scattered around. Not just death. And not just rebirth. Continued and cyclical and eternal death and rebirth is what all this means.
It all makes more sense with pictures.
The priority is what we call the long greenhouse, the 20 by 100 baby plant greenhouse I inherited from a neighbor some years ago. It was crushed by the great Christmas snow of ’09, and has laid scattered across the front field ever since. I’ve sorted through the mess and come up with a 20 by 60 ish structure, sort of straight and sort of plumb, that will be serviceable once there’s some plastic on it.
After that the perennial greenhouse, the pitched roof one made out of old well pipe, needs quite a bit of attention, meaning a bit of structural reinforcement and new plastic over the top. It may have to make due with new plastic on the sides and nothing else.
Fate may not allow me to do anything else this year. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to cover the big growing greenhouse. That’s the one that sat in my neighbor’s field for a few years and has stood, in skeletal form, in the lower field since the year before last. Yes, it needs plastic, too. And some purlins and some cross braces …. Then it will be ready to grow tomatoes.
Then there’s the propagation greenhouse, the one with the stone tables and the radiant table heat. That one is still a few years from completion, especially since I’ve diverted stones from that one to going to the new floor for the house. But more on that later.
The point of all this is that the new year brings with it greenhouse work, and greenhouses, like the new year, bring a sense of rebirth, resurgence and resurrection. They start barren and devoid of fruit, cold and sterile, seemingly unable to ever stay warm and get green. Sometimes they lay scattered about in pieces. Sometimes they are several years worth of building blocks that have not yet taken recognizable shape. Yet the bare dirt with-in soon warms and sprouts seeds. One barely remembers the emptiness of just a short time before. They become lush and green and provide plenty to eat.
That’s hardly news. The message here is that after the green, after the bounty, they get torn apart by wind, placed asunder by snow. They rot and collapse. They sink in the mud. They fall victim to apocalypse. Then, and here’s the thing, you get to put them back together again. And again.
That’s the true meaning of all the pieces of greenhouse I have scattered around. Not just death. And not just rebirth. Continued and cyclical and eternal death and rebirth is what all this means.
It all makes more sense with pictures.
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