5 CHEAP Little Greenhouses Anyone Can Build

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a hard morning that comes every autumn, and every gardener knows the dread of it. You wake, and the world outside is silvered over white, the first frost, and out in the garden your tender plants are blackening and dying where they stand. Most folks think there is nothing to be done, that to fight the frost you would need a great glass greenhouse costing thousands of dollars. But that is not so. For a few dollars, or even for nothing at all, you can throw up a little shelter over your plants that turns the killing frost aside and keeps them growing when your neighbor's garden is dead and black. In this video I show you five cheap little greenhouses that anyone can build, to protect your plants from frost and stretch your growing season at both ends of the year. I am Elias, and I have gardened this Lancaster County ground my whole life, where the winters come hard and the frost is no stranger. The old gardeners did not surrender their gardens to the first cold night. They knew a hundred cheap tricks for turning the frost aside with nothing but what was at hand, and these are the simplest of them. First, the honest truth of how these work: a clear cover warms the air inside by day and holds the frost off the leaves by night, but on its own it makes no heat, so on a bitter night it cools near as cold as the air outside. I show you the old fix for that at the end. In this video: ✔️ How these shelters actually work — and the daily tending secret: OPEN them on a sunny day so you don't cook your plants, closed by night against the frost ✔️ #1 THE DOME — a wire tomato cage and a clear bag over a potted plant (about $2), and how to do the same in the ground with hoops ✔️ #2 THE FREE SALAD-BOX CLOCHE — the clear clamshell your greens come in makes a perfect little greenhouse over a seedling, and keeps bugs off too (costs nothing) ✔️ #3 THE CLEAR TOTE — an upended clear storage tote banked with soil or leaves for a bigger plant (about $7) ✔️ #4 THE PALLET A-FRAME — two pallets and a plastic sheet make a tent over a row (mind the HT heat-treated stamp — never the chemical-treated pallets near food) ✔️ #5 THE WOODEN GREENHOUSE BOX — a simple hand-built frame with clear plastic, sized to your raised bed (the old cold frame that lasts for years) ✔️ THE OLD HEAT TRICK — set a jug of water inside to soak up the day's warmth and give it back through the cold night (thermal mass), or build against a south wall ✔️ The honest word on reusing plastic, and why you don't need a costly greenhouse to beat the frost Do these and you can turn aside the frost that ends your neighbor's garden, and keep your own growing weeks or months longer at both ends of the year, all for next to nothing. Which of these will you try, and how long a season are you fighting? Tell me in the comments below. And tell me your county and your climate, how hard your frosts come and how long your winters run, for these little shelters do different work in a light frost than in a hard freeze. I read every one. Next time, I will show you how to build a bigger greenhouse yet, a walk-in hoop house you can stand up inside and work in, cheaply, from bent pipe or cattle panel and a sheet of plastic, for the gardener who wants to grow through the cold in earnest. The old gardeners never surrendered their gardens meekly to the frost, but met it with cleverness and thrift, throwing up little shelters from whatever lay at hand to steal a few more weeks or months of growing from the year. There is a quiet triumph in walking out on a frosty morning to find your plants green and living under their humble covers while all around lies black and dead. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #Greenhouse #DIYGreenhouse #Gardening #FrostProtection #SeasonExtension #ColdFrame #Homestead #GrowYourOwnFood #GardenTips #WinterGardening #Frugal #ColdFrames #Homesteading #EliasYoder