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Article: Free to Cheap Many people have an old shed, chicken coop, pigeon coop, tool shed...you get the idea. Many great greenhouses have been made out of these. Pick up picture windows(because they are big and are usually insulated glass) from your local dump or trash removal(look for houses having replacement windows done). Install some by cutting out some of the roofing or close in the front of an open shed or coop. Voila, it works!! I just wrote to a young lady in zone 2 who wanted to renovate a pigeon coop into a greenhouse.. She was going to use greenhouse plastic to close in the open sides but was not going to do much to the roof except a couple of skylights. This would not give enough light or enough free heat from sunny days. I suggested she remove the tin roof, and install clear corrugated plastic roofing. If she could not do that, perhaps they could get some steel pipe, bend it into an arch form. Remove the roof, attach the pipe in arched form where the roof was, then use greenhouse plastic to cover the bent pipes just like in a traditional greenhouse. We then discussed getting some additional heat. One old fashioned way is to use 50 gallon drums, paint them black or cover them with black plastic. Fill the drums with water. The black absorbs the heat into the water during sunny days and radiates the heat back into the greenhouse during the night. These drums also can be used as a base for benches. Some wooden pallets or pieces of wood placed on top is just perfect for your plants. The water is also wonderful because it becomes tempered and you are not shocking your seedlings with 50 degree water. Think about how much heat is required to bring your soil temperatures back up to 65 degrees when we cool it down to 50 degrees each time we water. In my business that comes to Thousands of Dollars. Another heat idea, and one that is the current leader everywhere, is to run heated pipes or hoses under your benches. Simple enough to do from a hot water heater or old boiler furnace. See the plants only need heat in their soil base, not their leaf canopy. The heat that is at the top of your greenhouse is also a waste. Applying heat to the soil is the most cost efficient and most effective growing method there is. A plumber friend made a greenhouse heating system from old steam radiators, pipe and an older boiler. He laid radiators on their sides spaced about 10 feet apart, under the greenhouse benches, connected them with pipe and then to his boiler. The result was a very even heat, all under the plants which collected the heat instead of the roof. The first, though horrible, greenhouse my hubby made was like a porch off a garden storage shed. It was all old storm windows. It lacked proper ventilation, which was solved by making an additional door so I could let the air blow through from time to time. Awful as it looked and time consuming as it was to open and shut doors, it did grow flowers. The cost was about nothing. He did a lot of dump picking(but that he is favorite hobby) and got the materials. So put on your creative scavenger hats and see what you come up with.
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