In Which I Am Assaulted By a Greenhouse

I have a greenhouse.

It’s shiny, and new, and I’ve been super excited about it, especially since the greenhouse I had last year BLEW AWAY while I was out of town.

So basically this:

Super stoked about this. Gonna put ALL my plants in this.

Enter Wisconsin weather in the spring. There I was, minding my own business on the phone in our bedroom, when outside there was a NOISE.

An ominous noise.

A wind rippling violently on plastic noise.

I jumped to my feet and looked outside, and my greenhouse, that I had lovingly staked down with more than 30 stakes, had half lifted free and was trying to take flight.

I hung up, ran outside, threw the first full pot (chives!) I could find in it, and then, when the wind surged, jumped into it and held it down with my body weight.

Which, fantastic, this worked. Disaster averted.

Except now I was outside, bodily holding down a greenhouse, alone, with no way to get help. My phone was inside. My husband was inside on Zoom for an appointment for another 20 minutes.

It was cold outside, but it was comfortable IN the greenhouse, so it wasn’t bad, per say. I’d run out in bare feet and a T-shirt, but it was warm enough that I wasn’t in danger. It was just loud.

I ended up sitting there and waiting for half an hour, spread eagle with my hands and bare feet holding down everything I could.

My husband finally realized I wasn’t in the house and came out to investigate, and he’s the clever one. He looked things over for a moment, not laughing which is full points. Then he took the old shelves from the greenhouse that flew away and put them on the bottom shelves, and then weighed them down with heavy concrete chunks. I then proceeded to stake like crazy.

Like this:

And this:

And then I ziptied like crazy to hold the whole thing together, mostly with black zipties, but I ran out and used purple and orange. It had popped apart at a few joints, so I wanted to prevent that.