Greenhouse build - part 1

Its been quite the productive few days for us!  We'll start with last Wednesday and Thursday.  For those who have been following along, as of last Tuesday, we had a level pad on the farm for the 20'x96' hoop house we were about to put up.  Continuing on from that point...

Wednesday morning we got up at a reasonable hour (read: early) and unloaded all the remaining greenhouse poles (mostly for the larger greenhouse) out of storage and hauled them up to the farm.  For those not priveledged enough prior to this to see the stack of poles required to erect a 36'x96' hoop house, here you go!

When we got to the farm, it was still not quite blazing hot yet, so we decided to do a little groundwork on the small greenhouse.  We took the precise corners we had measured before and started pounding in the six foot long anchor poles for the greenhouse.  We left more than needed out of the ground so that we could come back and level them well.  We felt very fortunate that only 3 of the 17 poles on the back side hit rocks on the way in - we had expected many more.  By the time we were finished with that, it was getting really hot and we were plenty tired.

Thursday morning we were up at the farm about 7:00AM.  Our friend Julie came out to help again and we managed to get the 3 problem rocks removed and the poles leveled over the course of the morning.  For anyone wondering why leveling 34 poles and removing 3 rocks would take 5 hours, I offer these pictures of the rocks and the thought of pounding poles 3 feet into dry clay. 

For scale, this rock is about 2 feet by 16 inches by 8 inches

We just finished digging out the last rock - you can see it at Julie's feet

This was a booger of a rock to get out!

We took a siesta from about noon to 4:30 to rest and recouperate through the hottest part of the day (did we mention that it was 105 when we left the farm and when we went back?).

Thursday evening, we managed to assemble and install all 17 hoops.  That was a really good feeling even though we were completely exhausted!  Did you know that if you sweat enough in the same shirt, salt crystals will form on it?  That was an interesting discovery...

Taking a break part way through - did we mention it was HOT?

All the hoops are up!

After we got all the hoops up, we started drilling the holes to bolt them to the anchor poles.  We managed to use up the drill bit after about 28 poles - apparently drilling through over 100 layers of galvanized steel pipe is hard on a bit.  Who knew?

Stay tuned for what we accomplished on Friday!