Greenhouse Part Two

 Every good building needs a solid foundation. After kicking around various thoughts for awhile, we finally settled on concrete. It is a one and done foundation and eliminates space under the structure for various varmints and critters to call home.  But as you can see above with our forms leveled out, our property has a fair amount of slope even on this "flatter" section of our lawn. None the less, we are proceeding though it will mean a fair amount of work. 

With my wife's help one weekend, we dug in the uphill side of the form and leveled it out. I wanted to dig it in to keep the backside height of concrete to a minimum and to keep the frontside height of concrete low enough I can drive a mower right into the building easily and yet not have water run down the slop and into the building. If everything goes as planned, there will be a two inch step down to the lawn on the lawnmower storage side of this building. 

By the time we got the front done, it was killing hot and we were completely soaked in sweat so we went inside until late that evening and came out and set the two side boards. I finished with the back side of the forms using various clamps and blocks as an extra set of hands and got everything leveled out. But, the backside of the form was quite a bit higher than I had hoped and so there are large gaps that need to be filled. I started filling them in but with an excessive heat warning for the day, I just had to give it up and move on to other things. My plan for this coming week is just to get up early and start working on things until it gets hot and then call it a day. 

Still to come, I need a lot more support and bracing installed once I fill in all the gaps and I need to level out the inside of the forms because I really don't need or want to pay for 18" thick concrete in places. I also need to figure out reinforcement to keep the concrete from heaving if/when it cracks. I called up my go to concrete guy and he is booked out for this year and most of next, hence while I'm doing much of this myself. But he thought if I got it formed up, he could help pour it which should only take a few hours perhaps on a short day or between jobs. 

I thought I would include a bonus photo of some sweetcorn risotto with scallops that we had recently using what meager sweetcorn we have been able to harvest from our garden. The really wet spring prevented about half of what we planted from even producing nay ears and the other half has been really slow to produce and what ears were produced had few rows and lots of gaps in the kernels. Pretty ugly looking but it still tasted fabulous in risotto with a dab of crème fresh and of course the scallops.