Pacific Northwest Gardening: Plant Combinations, 0 by

wrote:
I have a greenhouse, and I wish it was bigger. I love my greenhouse. We got the largest one we could afford at the time, and I thought that it would be plenty big, but I was wrong. I start more and more seeds each year, and I have a large collection of succulents that I have to overwinter inside. So I do wish it were larger. I also wish I had opted for triple wall polycarbonate instead of glass, but I love the look of the English conservatories so much, and this structure is really a part of the overall garden design. So I opted for plain glass and I insulate it in the winter with bubble wrap and 4ml plastic sheeting. That does a fairly good job. I have a small heater set on low all the time during the winter. On Saturday when our temps went up to the high 50's and it was sunny outside, it got up to 87 degrees in the greenhouse! It was so lovely!!

Here's a photo from last summer that shows the greenhouse and pond. You can see that because of the location, it made sense to get one that was as attractive as possible. Hey, maybe what I need is ANOTHER greenhouse that will be more utilitarian!

mauryhill, I agree that it is possilble to break down a large area into smaller, more workable chunks and make great progress that way. Also, here is a good way to do the weeding without breaking your back and improve your soil at the same time:
Get as much very heavy cardboard as you can find. Just start collecting boxes from people, and saving yours, etc. Cover your weed encroached area with the heavy cardboard and wet it down well. Really soak it. Then put about 6-8 inches of landscaping bark on top of that and wet that down as well. Then let it sit for a year. Anne Lovejoy calls this the 'smother' method and it works really, really well. If you have a very large area, you can just do a bit at a time. We did this on our entire front area year before last, and last year it was ready to plant. If you want to plant right away, you just dig a hole through the cardboard, plant your shrub or whatever, and cover the hole with bark. We did that in the back and , again, it worked really well. We were killing english ivy and blackberry mostly.