Greenhouse Construction

Wow, has it been cold the last few days. The crew has begun construction of our greenhouse here at Glen Echo CC. This will be a valuable tool for us to utilize over the years to come in an attempt to reduce costs in our operation and provide the club with very attractive plant material for our landscape beds. Chef Rob also is visualizing how he can potentially utilize the house to grow some unusual varieties of vegetables and sprouts.

A blank wall before we start the construction of the greenhouse. I decided to do a Quonset hut or lean-to style greenhouse for a number of reasons.

The aluminum arch material we are using came from an old greenhouse from the 70's that my father had torn down at one time for a landscape business he started. I know he would be happy that I was able to use this material.

A hard surface for the floor of the greenhouse to help keep it clean.

One less wall which will reduce heating and construction costs.

Electric, water and heat source from the building for easy installation and use.

South and east facing for early morning sun. Would have been best for south and west but you have to take what you get. We did not have another site to chose.

Skip and Russell Klevorn are hammer drilling into the block wall to attach the header board to the wall.

Lady is inspecting the guys work. The drilling into the block wall took a lot of time. The beginning of our arches which will hold the poly material in place. The arches were not quite long enough to give us an 18' wide house like we wanted so the guys came up with an idea to get some metal tubing and slide the arches into the tube where we would bolt the arch to the tube and extend our length. The guys used 3' on the wall side and about 2' on the road side.




We have everyone working on this project. Our mechanic, Harry White is welding brackets on the metal tubes so we can bolt the arches to the treated wood base. The welding was fairly simple for the building side, he basically made them perpendicular to the tubing but on the road side he had to weld each bracket at a different angel because our site was sloping in different directions as we went down the line.

Skip and Russell are attaching the tubing into the header board and then drilling through the tube to keep the aluminum frame in place.

Skip and Russell are attaching the wiggle wire tracks to the end of the greenhouse. This is what is used to hold the plastic in place. The tracks have to be placed along the complete edge of the width and length of the greenhouse. We intend to inflate the main area of the greenhouse with a small fan that constantly blows air and keeps it inflated. This provides a layer of warm air which helps with insulation and heat loss. We have to then put a second set of tracks around the end of the house which will hold a single layer of plastic. We will be installing fans out of one end and a ventilation openings at the other end to help cool the greenhouse during the heat of the day this spring. We installed some 2x4 bracing down the length of the greenhouse to give some strength to the arches.

Mike is beginning to work on framing in the ends which will house the ventilation and Russell and Skip continue to install the tracks to hold the poly in place.

Our guys are doing a great job in the construction of our greenhouse. We have a few more days of work to go but with the warm weather predicted for Thursday/Friday, we will be on the course getting things ready for you to come out and enjoy a round of golf. We will be completing our work next week as our work schedule allows. Plants will be arriving the middle of March so we have a deadline to get it completed.