The greenhouse gets the green light
In which my boyfriend casually adds a new building to our front garden, and starts growing stuff
It started with digging. The bits and pieces for the new greenhouse lay scattered around the farm: metal bars at one end, plastic at the other. The company that delivered it offered to put it up for us, but that cost almost as much as the greenhouse itself, so my boyfriend resolved to do it on his own. Surely it would only take a few days (spoiler alert: it took a few weeks). Step one: dig 30 (!) square holes in the ground and fill each one with concrete. Luckily, we found a concrete mixer tucked in the corner of one garage. Our son took great joy in watching it turn.
Digging the holes was sweaty, repetitive work – and marked a huge change for my boyfriend after three years in an office job. He would come in in the evenings covered in mud, looking proud. ‘Six down.’ ‘I’ve done seventeen now.’ ‘Nearly there.’ He was also exhausted. The whole thing reminded me of Louis Sachar’s Holes, a fabulous book that I’ve taught so many times I’ve resolved never to read it again.
After the holes, next it was mounting the metal frame. This required reinforcements, and various family members moved in for a few days to lend a hand. We even had friends visit from the mountains for a weekend to help out. Three of them worked all day in the rain one Sunday and made huge progress, then all ran inside in their pants to take showers. We repaid them with pizza and raclette.
I shared with a friend that I was worried about whether the greenhouse would go up ‘in time’ for the seedlings to benefit this year. Putting the plastic over the frame was tricky and time-consuming, and required at least four people, depending on the wind that day. She said, ‘You just need to make it a community event. Invite all our local friends to help, and feed them at the end.’ And that’s exactly what happened.
Four friends plus my father-in-law arrived ready to get the plastic on and made pretty fast work of it, despite one minor injury that required stitches, eek. They were fed slabs of meat and cold beer and our eternal gratitude. And, all of a sudden, we had a greenhouse. There only remained a few finishing touches: putting on the windows and doors so that the place could be aired, and building tables on which to place 1000 seedlings.
Today, we ate our lunch in the greenhouse, sitting at one of those tables. I gazed around at all of the life inside, thinking that just a couple of months ago, this was an overgrown field. I suppose this is what it means to make a dream a reality: one step at a time, but every step is essential, and a project like this is only possible with the support of the people around you. Merci mille fois to everyone who lent a hand, and of course to everyone who takes the time to read this newsletter. It means the world.