How we made a huge saving on our own home-made polytunnel
Take three old gazebo frames, some coppice poles, a large sheet of tough polymaterial, some willing friends to help out.. and hey presto! Your very own home-made greenhouse.
When my parents offered us some old gazebos after clearing out the shed, I knew they’d come in handy somehow so we gratefully took them off their hands. It turns out they were perfect for our very own greenhouse. Each gazebo frame is 2.5m wide and 2.5 m high with a pitched roof.
With the frames being so flimsy, we had to do a lot of reinforcing with ‘bush poles’ or coppice poles, lashing together, and gaffer taping! We also pegged down the feet securely with huge coppice-pegs. We dug trenches either side of the frame to secure down the plastic.
The huge 9m x 11m plastic sheet cost us £110 from First Tunnels. We waited for a perfect still, warm spring day and called in the troops to help us pull it over the frame. Once pulled and nudged over the pitch of the frame using brooms, we secured it by burying the edges into the trenches, pulling in all the corners taut.
Bo fashioned a door from the old gazebo side-panels and we secured all the corners and edges.The first few windy nights were sleepless and there were lots of ‘I’m just going to check on the greenhouse!’ but it survived! We have since done a bit of tweaking of corners, and retightening but it is going strong!
An equivalent sized polytunnel would have probably cost us around £900 so we made ourselves a huge saving on our spacious and practical greenhouse.
In the future I’d love to work towards making one of purely recycled materials, old windows etc, and to move away from using plastic sheeting. But we are pretty pleased with our first attempt this season.
