While we served as missionaries in Haiti our family was exposed to the tremendous advantage of growing plants and vegetable in a greenhouse environment.  For the small farmer in Haiti it was simply capitalism at work.  There are 100’s of farmers that grow essentially the same vegetables (and in most cases the same variety of vegetables), plant them at the same time, water them similarly (rain water) and thus harvest them at the same time, resulting in the market being flooded with any given vegetable and thus driving the price down significantly.  Enter the small greenhouse – allowing a farmer to plant their vegetables earlier, by a period of 2-4 weeks, and thus allowing them to get to market earlier than all of their “competitors” and creating a significant raise in profit for that particular farmer.  This was a windfall experience for the farmer and as it turned out a rather successful project for USAID and others who were hard at work in Haiti.

You may be wondering, why is this relevant for the Bidwells?  The last 6 months have brought about the circumstance where we made the decision to home-school our daughter, Kilee Anne who is 11 years old and entering the sixth grade.  Through this process, Monica and I both felt that instilling in Kilee a sense of ownership and entrepreneurship was something that would be very valuable for her schooling now and in her development for the future.  So we began thinking through how we might create a micro-business for her to manage and we landed on ornamental flowers and vegetable starts in the spring.  This was an easy decision because last spring we accidentally over-planted significantly our vegetable starts (Mostly because kids love to plant seeds and it’s pretty easy to get carried away!) and we easily sold all of our extra seedlings.  We realized quickly that some of our items sold lightning fast while others eventually were given away.

After deciding that we for sure wanted to have a greenhouse, last year we created a small one over one of our raised garden beds.  Fortunately plant growth isn’t tied to the beauty of the construction.

This small greenhouse worked well throughout the winter with a small electric space heater and some consistent hand watering after it became cold enough that we were afraid that our drip irrigation would freeze and burst all of its components.  As the weather warmed last year we couldn’t wait to take this one down simply because it was an eye sore in our yard and that got us thinking about what our next step might look like…

This blog is part of a series that will share about why and how we chose to construct a greenhouse on our mini-farm in middle Georgia.