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I am new to this gardening stuff but I'm having a bash. I've started potting veggie seeds and putting them on every window seal in the house, i've now run out of room and need a green house, i have two small children so cant have glass, need a beginers green house thats not too expensive, anyone know what i should get and wheres best to go?

You can get a bookcase style one... it is just shelves with a covering over it.

They cost about £20 I think

I think that you can get regular greenhouses with perspex instead of glass but they would be alot more pricey and of course you could go for a poly-tunnel.

Thanks PanAnn, I need all the help I can get, I moved house and have gone from a smal courtyard to lovely 100ft garden. Trying to educate the kids, dont want them thinking fruit and veg only come from supermarkets. Thanks again.

excellent start.

yeh you can get diddy plastic greenhouses as Ann said. or maybe you could make a cold frame?

Friends with small people put chicken wire round the perimeter of their existing glass house. Not sure if anyone ever tried to drive a pedal-car though it or not but I guess it would have done the job if required!

it might not stop a football though lol

oh and sorry if I sound a bit dim, but whats a cold frame?

We're in the process of replacing all of the glass in ours with double-wall polycarbonate, because a sparrowhawk flew straight into the glass and broke its neck (breaking the glass in the process). Not as big a catastrophe as a small child running into it, I know, but I was terribly upset and angry with myself for not foreseeing such an event. You can get 3.5mm polycarbonate sheeting, so it's a straight replacement for glass.

jumping bean wrote:oh and sorry if I sound a bit dim, but whats a cold frame?

It's basically just a small greenhouse for hardening off plants (i.e. getting them used to the great outdoors if you've started them off inside)
This sort of thing

I made a Greenhouse-ish thing from some cupboard doors, which I just lined with polythene stapled onto the wooden frame. It tends to get damaged by the wind and I'm replacing it with very thin (0.5mm) Polycarbonate when this happens.

Well, you can get a plastic one from Woolworths shop (if you have one locally). Or if you have the room you can have a sort of half greenhouse up against a wall.

Or as someone said - a cold frame. I have a cold frame in my garden beside the greenhouses which I use for lettuce and baby salad leaves. Its a metal frame with glass panels at the top - only about a metre by a metre in size. You can fit a fair bit in it..

I am in the process of aquiring a very large glass green house... it is all glass...
We imagine some glass will need replacing at some point at which point we will get some of that polycarbonate stuff (any one know where to get it from and how much it costs?)

We just can't afford to do it all at the start.... and we have a toddler... she'll just need to not play near the greenhouse

When I bought a greenhouse polycarbonate was the most expensive glazing option - more dear than the thickest safety glass!

Polytunnels are cheaper than greenhouses, and start from 6'x8' (First Tunnels). They're just over half the price of a greenhouse, and get comparatively cheaper as the size goes up.

hedgewizard wrote:Polytunnels are cheaper than greenhouses, and start from 6'x8' (First Tunnels). They're just over half the price of a greenhouse, and get comparatively cheaper as the size goes up.

how long do they last though?

Red - assuming you get the skin nice and tight they will last 5 years min. Our small one is now 4 years old and the skin is as slack as a yak (this is why I advocate the timber base rail!) because the frame sunk into the ground over time.

It has been patched loads of times now because the slack polythene is easily torn in the wind. It is not yet showing signs of going brittle with the sun. I hope it has a couple more years left before we have to recover it (with the timber base rail this time!)

Golf balls bounce off polytunnels. They don't bounce off greenhouses