Lee Valley's Row Greenhouse

Using a row greenhouse in my back yard vegetable garden has allowed me to extend my growing season into early spring, while protecting seedlings from hungry rabbits!

A few years ago, one of our good friends gave to us as a wedding gift a $300 gift card for the mecca of all garden shopping destinations: Lee Valley.

While this store sells woodworking and hardware items, its main draw for me is the unique and very useful gardening tools and gadgets their catalogues frequently feature. I had been wishing for a greenhouse ever since we had started gardening together, and this was my chance to get one!

What I purchased was not a traditional greenhouse, but a row greenhouse, one that sits directly on the soil in the vegetable garden. This product covers 76 square feet of my vegetable garden from early spring right into summer, and cost just $62.50CAD. It is assembled in much the same manner as pitching a tent, with the use of steel anchors pegs that fit through metal-lined holes along the edge of the plastic cover.

The advantages to using a row greenhouse are many. Perhaps the most significant “bonus” to using the row greenhouse in my yard, in addition to extending the growing season, is that the rabbits that visit our back yard buffet rather frequently don’t seem to be able to penetrate the sides of the greenhouse, keeping the small seedlings and tender spring greens safe inside.

The major drawback is that, although vegetable seedlings do very well inside the row greenhouse, so do weed seedlings. The soil inside the row greenhouse is currently covered with a very fine covering of tiny clover seedlings. The row greenhouse also prevents rain from penetrating the soil inside, so watering is necessary.

A product such as Lee Valley's row greenhouse is a great addition to every vegetable garden, especially for those who battle bunnies!