I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of the inside of the greenhouse, at least once it started making things green. Here you see the wraparound shelves made of office light fixtures; Emma and I completed the shelves on the right after I wrote about them, but Jess found to my consternation that not enough light penetrates to the lower shelves to grown anything there. So we use them for storage.

If you were to see the greenhouse in person you would see why I say it looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe. Bent nails, irregular angles, used lumber–kind of a mess. I did much better building the bike shed. But the greenhouse hasn’t fallen down yet, and I bet the bank windows prefer being out here to being in pieces in a landfill somewhere. (You can still see the bank hours silkscreened on one of the windows at the top of this shot.) As for the rest of it, you see that we just wrapped the walls in plastic and that was fine. Maybe we’ll have the money to replace it someday, but not today. And plastic seems to do just fine, ‘cept in a high wind.

Way back when we started growing things in the greenhouse, ‘long ‘bout May, we had scores of little plants out here. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, celery, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, I don’t know what all. As the plants got bigger and the summer got warmer, Jess gradually moved them outside. Eventually all that was left in the greenhouse were the watermelon, cantaloupe, and peppers. Our cantaloupe did better this year: It managed to produce twice as many fruits as last year (for a total of two), one of which was twice as big as last year’s effort (baseball sized, instead of egg sized). The watermelon did about the same. The peppers look fabulous but there’s not a whole lot of pepperage on the plants. Lots of great leaves, not lots of great peppers. Well, we’ll try something different next year. That’s gardening’s theme: There’s always next year.

Interestingly, our celery did surprisingly well. We had five or six plants, and they flourished in the greenhouse until Jess took them outside, and then they flourished outside as well. They never got the big tall green stalks you see in the trucked-from-California variety, but their stalks were six or eight inches long and good eatin’. I just had some in my soup for lunch.