Goodbye greenhouse

The next thing I did Saturday afternoon was dismantle my temporary greenhouse. I knew this was going to be somewhat of a difficult job, but I was getting tired of looking at it.

As you can see, it's not much to look at. I've talked about this temporary structure before, and how I had to redesign it on-the-fly as cold gusty winds dismantled it as I watched at the start of winter.

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I probably could have taken this down a month ago, but I wanted to have a place to put plants if there was a late-season freeze. Although the last frost date for St. Louis is around the first week of May, in 2007 we had a few days of mid-20's (F) lows in late April, so I didn't want to take any chances.

The greenhouse is PVC pipe, metal conduit, and plastic sheeting. The plastic sheeting is held on by special snap-on clamps, several of which were enforced with screws.

Screws came out first, then I labeled all of the PVC sections in case I want to put this up again this year. I doubt I will, but you never know.

After the clips were off, I just had to remove the three large pieces of plastic. They were stapled to the wood frame that made the "foundation" of the greenhouse, but they came off pretty easily with just a good tug.

Some of the plastic was still wet because water had pooled in the roof, along with dozens of waterlogged, rotting maple tree helicopters.

After all of the plastic was off, it was time to remove the hose clamps that held the conduit in place. These pipes were critical to the strength of the structure -- the key component of my redesign in the windstorm.

Once they were off, it was time to remove the horizontal PVC supports. I noticed a few ants:

As I made my way toward the back, I noticed even more ants.

Then I hit the main nest. The ants were using a good part of the structure as their nest!

This one pipe was just full of ants!

I love the way the sunlight lit up the interior of the pipe enough for me to see them all.

With all of the cross-members removed, it was just a matter of pulling the uprights out of their supports:

Then just a little weed trimming (borrowed my neighbor's string trimmer, as I don't normally use one and gave mine away last year after it sat idle for a couple of years), and moved a few of the bamboo pots into the area.

It's so nice to not see the plastic structure back there now! When I build a shed someday, it will probably be in this same area, so having this temporary greenhouse was a good "practice" run.

After I finished this I noticed that the area that I caught a mole in earlier in the day was mounded up again, so I grabbed the hose and caught another one in the exact same spot!

MoleMeter 2010 mole capture count: 06

I don't think I've ever caught two moles on the same day in the same exact spot before. Unfortunately, there are still at least two moles active in my yard right now, and one keeps going into the veggie garden. He's got to be next for the Molemeter I hope.