1904 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



453 



praised! and may the good work keep 

 marching on! 



AN AUTOMATIC GREENHOUSE. 



One reason for selling out my old green- 

 houses was the expense of caring for them, 

 especially when I was absent. Unless 

 heat is turned on and off, the ventilators 

 opened and closed, and somebody has per- 

 sonal supervision, in almost any sort of 

 greenhouse the stuff may go to ruin very 

 quickly. If the ventilators are left open at 

 night during a freeze, damage will be done. 

 If they are left closed in the m ddle of the 

 day — perhaps the very day after the frost 

 — damage will be done again, byoverheat- 

 ing.* On this account I decided to give up 

 my greenhouse and the work I loved so 

 much; but, as I told you, along in February, 

 when we had bright sunny days suggestive 

 of spring, I felt as if I could not stand it 

 without a place where I could see things 

 grow, flowers unfold, etc. So I set about 

 making an automatic greenhouse, or as 

 near it as possible. 



Peter Henderson, in one of his books, tells 

 about a greenhouse that was constructed 

 over a large cellar or basement. The man 

 who constructed the basement afterward de- 

 cided not to build, so he put a greenhouse 

 on top of it, with a floor made of open slats. 

 The air in the basement was constantly 

 equalizing the air above, under the glass, 

 so as to correct the tendency to get either 

 very hot or very cold; and the experiment 

 succeeded well with hardy plants, without 

 any heat except that from the sun. 



I have before mentioned that we have 

 under the floors of cur heme a large base- 

 ment warmed by exhaust steam, and hot- 

 water pipes connected with radiators above. 

 This basement is always warm — often so 

 warm that we have to open the outside win- 

 dows to cool it off a little. "Well, I construct- 

 ed a lean to greenhouse on the east side, 

 with two good-sized windows opening into 

 it, from the large basement mentioned. 

 This lean-to is onlj' about 8X20 inside. 

 This gives two outside beds of 3 ft. each, 

 and a 2 ft. walk between them. In order 

 to keep it as warm as possible, the beds 

 are solid level with the ground outside, 

 and the 2 ft. walk is simply the 2 ft. -wide 

 trench cut 3 ft. into the ground. To keep 

 the ground from caving in at the sides, I 

 used roofing-slats, so there is nothing to rot 



*Just at this present time, wheii competent labor is 

 so scarce, everybody is studj^ing to get what he wants 

 done, witho it much expensive help. A man who can 

 care for a greenhouse, and will tememberio care for it, 

 costs money. With a little private affair one can not 

 expect a man to stay in the greenhouse all day long. 

 He must have other work somewhere. But the aver- 

 age man, when he gets busily engaged in this "other 

 work," will, as a rule, forget his greenhouse. 



or give way. This steampipe — or, rather, 

 sewer-pipe — that carries the steam under 

 ground runs across one end of it. This 

 ground being always hot, we use this end 

 of the house for colei and other plants that 

 like lots of heat. I wanted to cut a door 

 through from the cellar into my 2 ft. path 

 so I could have access during stormy weath- 

 er, without going outdoors. Mrs. Root has 

 not yet, however, given m^ permission (?) to 

 do so; but I think I can bring her around to 

 my way of thinking after a while. She ob- 

 jects on the ground that the greenhouse may 

 some time be taken away, and then there 

 will be an unsightly opening in the stone 

 wall. Of course, this doorway would equal- 

 ize the air in the greenhouse with that in 

 the cellar still more perfectly.* The glass 

 is double thick, A quality, 12 inches square. 

 The rafters or sash bars are of cypress, 

 2X2)^ inches. They are rather heavy, but 

 I wanted them to reach nearly 10 feet with- 

 out any middle supports, for reasons men- 

 tioned later on. The glass was slid in 

 grooves, without any putty, butted together, 

 of course; and I now have the most pei feet 

 roof overhead I ever had in any greenhouse. 

 The slope is about 3 ft. in the length of the 

 10 foot rafter; and there is not a particle of 

 drip, and hardly a crack where you could 

 push in a sheet of writing-paper. When 

 ordering the glass I explained what it was 

 for, and told them it must be cut exactly 

 square. When the boxes were opened I 

 found a slip of paper saying if there was a 

 light in the lot that was not perfect in cut- 

 ting and in quality I should let them know. 

 The glass came from the Diamond Glass 

 Co., Cleveland, O. 



Now, it is usual for florists to whitewash 

 the glass, say some time in April, when the 

 sun gets to be very hot. I do not like this 

 whitewash. Early in the spring it is a det- 

 riment, and it is also a detriment on cloudy 

 days and all winter long and mornings and 

 evenings. The appearance of a greenhouse 

 is always marred, in my estimation, by 

 being daubed with whitewash or any simi- 

 lar preparation. Now, here is what I did: 

 I went to the store and got the largest and 

 strongest curtain fixtures I could find. But 

 even these were not of sufficient length; so 

 I spliced them with a round stick of exact- 



* Most of us have found out that very few plants do 

 well in a room heated with a furnace or radiator. The 

 air is too dry. I have had to move our house-plants into 

 thckitchtn, where they had the btnefit of damp air 

 from the tea kettie in order to have them do well. A 

 good greenhouse should have a damp atmosphere a 

 greater part of the lime. If we open the ventilators 

 when theie is a cold north wind, this wind damages 

 tender stuff, and drives the mo sture from the air and 

 soil. I decided long ago that some method of keeping 

 down the temperature during sunshiny days, besides 

 opening the ventilators, would be a great desideratum, 

 and now I have it. As a rule, all the ventilation our 

 greeuh use gets is through those two windows that 

 open into the basement mentioned; and this basement, 

 being under ground, isalwaysmoreor le.-sdamp. The 

 air that comes through the ou side windows, before 

 getting into the greenhouse, is warmed in parsing the 

 steam- pipes in the basement. This warm basement 

 keeps up the temperature during cool nights, and 

 keeps the temperature down during suns liny days, 

 and at all times sends a rather damp atmosphere "in- 

 to the greenhouse. 



