Alexandru Chiuariu

Benefits of Lean-to Greenhouses

If your home is on a small plot and you have only a very small garden then you may well not wish to fill it up with a large greenhouse. Yet at the same time you may want somewhere that can help you to tend to your plants.

What you need is a compromise solution which can act as a smaller greenhouse, but which doesn’t consume all of the available space. Fortunately, that is exactly what a lean-to greenhouse can do for you, because it doesn’t take up all the space that a normal greenhouse does, but can still blend in with your home and not dominate the garden.

Here are some of the benefits of Lean-to Greenhouses:

1. They Blend In Better

In a way lean-to greenhouses are tailor made for people who want a greenhouse for practical reasons of caring for their plants, but are not that keen on actually having a new building to dominate their lovely calm garden.

So they are caught between the two worlds of wanting a greenhouse, and yet on the other hand not wanting it! A quandary indeed!

A lean-to greenhouse can help to solve this because they are designed so that they blend in much better with the surrounding architecture then the freestanding greenhouses. This means that you end up with all of the benefits of having a greenhouse, such as being able to care properly for your plants over the winter months, but without feeling as though you have compromised the look or integrity of your garden.

2. They Take Up Less Space

Space is another big deal with lean-to greenhouses. They are typically half the size of conventional greenhouses, and so you need much less land area in order to be able to accommodate a lean-to greenhouse on to your home. 

3. They Tend To Use less Energy

Heating costs to heat lean-to greenhouses also tends to be less. This is because the lean-to greenhouse shares a wall with your house, and so gets an added thermal benefit from that.

4. You Can Get Direct Access from Your Home

Because the lean-to greenhouse shares a wall with your house, it also means that the potential exists to share the two by knocking through the wall and putting in a door.

This is clearly a more involved process then many people would consider doing, but it is an option with a lean-to greenhouse that is simply not available with a freestanding greenhouse (unless you go all “Great Escape” and build a tunnel from your house to the outside – which probably isn’t a very sensible option!)

And because this option is like adding another room onto your home, it is possible that you could get back the cost of buying the lean-to greenhouse, and the door simply through the increased value that it adds to your home.

5. Possible Access to Water and Electricity

Connecting up a freestanding greenhouse to the electric or water supply is not really a viable option, because it would be prohibitively expensive to run the pipe work out into the garden.

The same however is not true for a lean-to greenhouse, because it is attached to your own home, and hence connecting it up to utilities like electricity or the water supply, is simply like extending the service to another room in the same house.

This could have uses to set up extra lighting in the lean-to so that you would be able to work in your greenhouse at night when it would otherwise be dark; or even to set up some kind of sprinkler system.

The benefits of lean-to greenhouses over their freestanding cousins are many and varied, and they are certainly an option you should seriously consider.

Article Tags: Lean-to Greenhouses

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR