If you’ve always wanted a greenhouse but have been put off by the high cost of building one, take heart. A pop-up greenhouse is affordable, easy to put up, and might be the answer to your gardening prayers.
We’ve all heard it before, “If you kids would stop buying your fancy lattes every day, you would be able to afford to buy a house!”
Wait, what? I thought this was about pop-up greenhouses.
It is. Stay with me.
(Or skip the next two paragraphs, get right to the greenhouse bit, and be sad when you aren’t in on the joke at the end.)
Unfortunately, that tired old line about lattes and house payments just isn’t true. The cost of living has skyrocketed in the past two decades while the price of so-called “luxury” items – furniture, appliances, and, yes, that fancy cup of coffee keeps coming down. The average mortgage payment in the U.S. is somewhere between $2,390-$2,715.
The average latte costs about $5.25, which means you would need to drink between 15-17 lattes every day to equal a mortgage payment. If you gave up that daily latte habit and saved that $5.25 (at 4%) for a down payment on a house, you would save enough in about eleven years. So yeah, that’s some…math.
What does this have to do with gardening and greenhouses?
Well, you might not be able to afford a house these days, but, likely, you can now afford a “luxury” gardening item – a greenhouse. Yes, building one or buying a prefab kit for a permanent greenhouse will still set you back a few thousand dollars. That price tag gets even higher if you’re looking to build a passive solar greenhouse.
But if you’re looking for a simple, sheltered area to grow plants and extend your growing season, you can do it for less than a couple hundred dollars these days with a pop-up greenhouse.
When I decided to switch to raised beds, I chose to buy Vego Garden’s modular raised bed kits last year. (You can read about what prompted that decision here. I think my blood pressure is finally coming down after fighting with the soil for nearly a decade.) I knew I wanted to cover one of the beds so that I could keep growing throughout the winter.
At first, turning it into a polytunnel seemed like a good idea.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
The first heavy snow made me realize what a pain it was going to be to move the plastic cover off each time I needed to access the bed. That is if the whole thing didn’t cave under the weight of the snow.
I stood there in the snow, thinking there had to be a better way.
Then I remembered my little indoor greenhouse, which I use for starting seeds, and wondered if they came in a larger size.
And that’s when I found out they make pop-up greenhouses.
You know those great little tents you can bring camping or to your kid’s soccer game to stay out of the sun or rain? Yeah, they basically took that idea and gave it a clear covering to make pop-up greenhouses.
I picked one up that’s 6’x 8’ for around $150. Or, you know, a month’s worth of lattes. I don’t know what the conversion to avocado toast would be.
It’s big enough to cover my raised bed and still leave me enough room to move around the bed to water and harvest.
Oh my gosh, what an improvement!
It was so easy to set up. I did it alone, and it took me all of ten minutes. The hardest part was wrestling it out of the box it shipped in.
Quality – I’m mildly impressed
I’m not going to lie; my expectations were pretty low for the price point. But I was mildly impressed by the quality. The frame is sturdy and well-made.
As far as the cover goes, I thought for sure it would be flimsy and thin, making it easy to tear, but it’s much heavier than I expected. Even the stakes that came with it to post it to the ground are pretty solid.
The areas where there will be friction from the frame rubbing against the cover have been reinforced to prevent holes.
Even the zippers seem pretty decent quality.
Is this thing winning any beauty contests? No. No, it is not. But I’m okay with that; it’s practical and gets the job done.
My only complaint is the Velcro straps that attach the cover to the frame inside the greenhouse. These are sewn into the seams of the cover and aren’t very strong. I used a rubber mallet to pound in the stakes to hold the frame to the ground. While I was pounding in a stake, I clipped one of the Velcro straps that I had attached to the frame post and ripped it off. Granted, I literally hammered it right off, but still.
Upon further inspection, it did not tear the seam of the cover, which was good. I only managed to tear the Velcro strap off. I think if you left this up year-round, these would quickly wear out and come loose.
However, that’s the other thing I love about this greenhouse – it isn’t permanent.
Once we reach the magical point of “all danger of frost has passed,” I’m going to fold it back up and put it in the garden shed for the summer. I’ll bring it back out in the fall when we get close to that first frost date. I expect that if I take care of it like I do my other garden tools, it will last me for years.
Finally! We all have the means to affordably extend our growing season at both ends of the year. That means more fresh veggies we can grow ourselves, which means saving more money, which means we’ll all be able to afford to buy a house. Or at least more lattes.
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