by Jean C. Fisher

Created on: May 21, 2009   Last Updated: July 06, 2011

HOW TO START & OPERATE A NURSERY ON A (very worn) SHOESTRING!

I worked for a couple of decades for wholesale and retail nurseries in practically every capacity one could. I’d been a transplanter, waterer, propagator, delivery driver, greenhouse foreman and a nursery manager. Over the years, I had also amassed quite a collection of my own plants.

One spring I found myself laid-off from my job and living on very meager unemployment compensation. The rental house we lived in at the time was surrounded by about ¾ of an acre of land and, looking around the yard one day, I thought to myself: “I’ve been running nurseries for other people all these years - why not start a little nursery of my own right here at home and make money for me for a change?”

I knew that I would need at least one small greenhouse to keep frost-tender plants over the winter and for sprouting seeds in January and February in order to have plants ready for sale by spring but I had almost no money with which to build one.

Years before, I’d rescued some pieces of U-shaped, galvanized pipe that a nursery I’d worked for was throwing away. The pipes had been used to hold black cloth over chrysanthemums on benches in a greenhouse in order to force-bloom them by regulating sunlight.

After reshaping the U-shaped pipes slightly and by using large-diameter, round, wooden posts as center supports and shorter, used 2x4s for outside wall supports - all nailed to pieces of plywood to hold them upright - I then drilled holes on the tops of all the posts and inserted the ends of the pipes into them; thus forming the “ribs” of the slanted roof of the greenhouse.

Next, I created a 2x4 frame (from scraps)  entirely around the bottom of the structure and, after constructing a doorframe on one end of the greenhouse and a frame to hold an air-grate (that I bought at the recycle center at the local dump) on the opposite end, I stretched clear plastic over the entire shell and secured it to the bottom 2x4 frame using a staple gun. I then built the door out of some scraps of 1x1s and 2x2s that I'd rescued from a big dumpster at a door manufacturing company in a nearby town.

In order to keep the plastic “shell” from ripping apart when expanding and contracting in high winds, I bought some inexpensive plastic “bird netting” (used for wrapping fruit trees to protect crops from birds) and stretched it tightly over the top of the plastic

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