Greenhouse Herbs for Year-Round Gardening

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“Every home should be a greenhome—a space for living connected to or wrapped around a greenhouse, a space full of life. It harvests warmth, oxygen, humidity, ions, nice smells, fresh food, and a continuous panorama of vitality.”

—Amory Lovins, co-CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a resource efficiency consulting center near Aspen, Colorado

The gardens at Heartsong Farm in northern New Hampshire host snow well into March, and soil temperatures are too cold for most garden seed germination until early June. Nancy Phillips used to have a three-month season in which to grow more than eighty varieties of culinary and medicinal herbs on 1 acre to supply the town of Lost Nation. But everything changed when she installed a greenhouse ten years ago. “Now I can’t imagine living without one,” she says. “We wouldn’t be able to afford growing at our scale in this climate.”

Siting the Greenhouse

A greenhouse should be placed on a south-facing, stable site that gets at least six hours of light a day in winter, is protected from high winds, is near water and electricity, and is accessible from the home and garden. Having a long face side facing south allows for maximum heat gain from the winter sun. A lean-to is most cost-efficient if the house makes up the northern wall. In the South, attaching a greenhouse to the east side of the house will shelter it from the hot afternoon sun.

Phillips’s 10-by-16-foot south-facing lean-to is made from reglazed cypress-framed glass windows salvaged from an 1860s schoolhouse covered with a layer of clear rigid plastic. It relies on its proximity to the house, a small woodstove surrounded by loose bricks and flanked by water containers that hold heat, and an electric space heater (when temperatures dip into or below the thirties) to create a “warming room” that extends the growing season by four months. Four-inch fiberglass batts fill the studded wall cavities, and 10-inch batts insulate the back ceiling. Heating the greenhouse costs Phillips about $15 during March and April, and she burns about a quarter cord of wood, most of it pruned from her apple trees.

The greenhouse nurtures more than just plants. “Going into the greenhouse in March is a balm for my soul,” Phillips says. “It helps me make it through until the crocuses and daffodils start poking up. One of the greatest pleasures is going in there when the rest of the world is covered with snow and my heart is yearning for some green.”

Greenhouses have been much appreciated as climate controllers and ­indispensable additions to the garden and home since Roman times. During the nineteenth century, large steel and glass home conservatories were a sign of wealth in England and America, but with the advent of plastic construction materials, today’s greenhouses come in styles, sizes, and prices to meet nearly every herb grower’s needs.

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