The Shade House

I would love to have a greenhouse. I have a Pinterest board full of beautiful glasshouses, ranging from cute cottage types to poly hoop houses. I hate the cold, and the idea of having a warm place to garden through the winter seems like heaven to me. 

But. 

I live on the 32nd North Parallel, in Jackson, MS. We’re at the same longitude as Tel Aviv, Israel and Savannah, Georgia. It gets hot here. Damned hot. Last year (2023) we had 119 days where the high was over 90 degrees. We only had 17 nights when it went below freezing. A greenhouse would be nice perhaps a month a year, and unbearable the rest of the time. 

But a warm place in the winter is not the only benefit you get from gardening under cover. Being able to control the environment, ergonomic plant benches, and storage are also things you get from a greenhouse. I joked that I needed the opposite of a greenhouse. But then I got to thinking. 

I built myself what I call a shade house. It’s basically a lean-to against the fence. It faces south, and gets full sun the whole year. If I had a greenhouse, this is where it would go. It’s 6×8, and is made like a lean-to pole barn – 4×4 uprights and 2×4 girts. The lath is pressure treated 5 and 1/2 inch wide fence pickets, ripped to 1 and 13/16 inches, so I get three pieces from every picket. They are spaced one picket width apart, so they let 50% sun through. 

I originally planned to have lath for the overhead, but it rains 1/3 of the days here, and I plan to use it mostly as a small nursery and to house my plant’s waiting to be planted, so I decided some cover would be nice. The polycarbonate sheets (5 of them) are smoke colored, and came from Home Depot. They let 35% light through, and block the UV. I put it up just like you would tin on a pole barn. 

I intend to put crushed rock on the floor, and I think I can manage a small mist set up under the back bench. My plants waiting to be put out are ridiculously happy in there, and it’s at least 10 degrees cooler inside than outside. 

I mostly plant perennials, so I can “winter sow” them here, and the few vegetables I start before the last frost day can be started in the shed under lights, the way I do now.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t invent this – orchid growers use something similar called a lath (rhymes with math) house. These days they mostly use shade cloth, but back in the day used strips of wood, or lath. 

I plan to greatly increase the number of plants I have in the garden, and plants are expensive! So, I hope this will make it easier for me to grow them from seed and from cuttings. I’ll keep you posted. 

The unknown clematis

The future home of the unknown clematis

I bought a clematis today. It doesn’t have a name. I don’t know why this bothers me, but it does. I don’t mean that it doesn’t have a name like Frank or Shelia, but I don’t know the variety name, like Pink Perfection or Jackman. And this is sorta important if you are trying to grow things in the hot and humid Southland that are not native to here. (This is why I mostly grow things that are native to here. It makes research easier.)

For example, if you want to grow peonies and you live in Southern New York, you can go by WalMart and grab whatever peony is on the bargain shelf and stick it in the ground and have peonies. But if you live in Central Mississippi, they will still have peonies at WalMart, but if it isn’t one of maybe three varieties, you stand little chance of it surviving, and even if it is the right variety, it might struggle if you don’t get everything just right. In other words, you need to know what the name of the peony is that you are buying if you want it to do well here. (Don’t ask me for advice on peonys. I love them, but they are too hard to grow here, and lots of stuff isn’t, so I grow that stuff instead).

Variety is less critical with clematis (We say cluh-mat-tis around here, but Monty Don says clem-a-tis. I have no idea who is right. Luckily, this is a blog and not a podcast), but still, it’s nice to know. The label just said clematis, and had a picture of a purple bloom on it. It didn’t even give the full botanical name. This is what I get for waiting until so late in the year to buy a clematis for my new rose arbor. 

A search of the internet and comparing pictures leads me to suspect this is similar to Sweet Summer Love, which would be good if it were, as that is a hybrid of Sweet Autumn Clematis, and that does well here. But that is a patented variety, and this has no such info on the label. I have no idea. 

It’s worth noting that for most of human history, plants didn’t have names. I don’t know the variety name of the purple flowered germanic bearded iris that grows in my front yard . They were given me by an elderly couple who adopted us when we lived in NC. They acted like our surrogate grandparents when we were far, far away from our people. 

They had been given to his mother when he was a small boy (he is now 85) by an elderly neighbor, who said she had had them forever. So, they are probably at least 120 years old. 

I have two neighbors here I have shared some with. It makes me excited to know that I am extending the bloodline, if you will, and ironically, by sharing them, I make sure they won’t run out. But I don’t know their names. My yard is filled with pass-along plants like that – plants that only have the word of the person who gave it to you as their credential.