Why Have a Home Greenhouse?

You may think of a home greenhouse as mostly a glass structure used to extend your growing season. However they have a history going back centuries. In those days, a greenhouse was called a conservatory. It was used by collectors to house and grow not only exotic plants but birds and small animals as well. One could well imagine smaller monkeys being brought back to be kept in conservatories from explorations of Africa. All the new countries being discovered and explored were the sources of the exotic plants and animals that might be found in these old conservatories.

These conservatories were used to grow food as well as house exotic specimens from around the world. They allowed the Europeans to have such delicacies as oranges that would be grown in an orangery (or orangerie), so called as that was their specific purpose as a greenhouse. Even as long ago as 30AD, a greenhouse was built to provide cucumbers for the Roman Emperor Tiberius. As glass manufacturing had not been discovered yet, light entered their form of a greenhouse through sheets of mica. Even early American pioneers used thin sheets of mica to allow light into their homes well into the 19th century as glass was still expensive and hard to transport across the country then.

Greenhouses today use glass and certain translucent plastics to make up their walls and roofs. Glass and these plastics allow the whole light spectrum to pass through into your structure. However, they also prevent all of the different types of light waves from passing back through the walls and roofs.

Infrared which we sense as heat is one of the wavelengths that does not escape back out of the home greenhouse through the glass. It is this which we use to heat the air inside our structure giving us the heat we want to grow our plants.

The combined effect of bringing in all that light energy, while only part of it escapes, causes the temperature to tend to be higher inside than out. Anyone sitting in a closed car in the summer sun is familiar with the effect. That's why greenhouses sometimes are called hothouses.

Beyond the heating effect of all that light entering through the glass to heat things up, plants need the sunlight for photosynthesis as well. Photosynthesis is the whole process that plants use to absorb nutrients, move nutrients around, and perform the chemical reactions needed. Think of sunlight as priming the pump of life in plants.

Greenhouses are also the artificial structure that allows us to control what gets at our plants. An outside garden may have to deal with hail, freezing temperatures, too much rain, and assorted pests such as deer. Not so within a conservatory where we can much more easily control these factors. So when you build your own greenhouse, be sure you build it so these things can't affect your plants.

Beyond all these aspects of greenhouses, they can simply be incredibly beautiful additions to our landscaping whether bought as a kit, you have someone build it for you or you build your own greenhouse. Whether a stand alone architectural wonder or a lovely room-expanding addition to the home, a home greenhouse makes for envious gardeners wherever they are found.

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