I like the idea as I have a greenhouse and a henhouse, but mine are 100 years apart. I have thought of bringing the chickens into the greenhouse a couple of times to control aphids and whiteflies, but then I discovered I had mantids in there and left the chickens alone. The first issue I thought of about your greenhouse plan was the wood frame sitting directly on the sod. Untreated wood will rot in a year or two, while treated wood isn't good to use near food crops. I would start instead with a concrete perimeter foundation either poured or constructed of cinderblocks secured together with metal clips and voids filled with cement. This foundation also needs to be sunk into the soil a couple inches. You need to set it below your frost line so that it doesn't heave in winter. After you construct the foundation and before you build the greenhouse you will want to run water and electricity inside to a convenient location so that you can provide heat and water to both your hens and your plants. The less expensive option would require hauling hoses or buckets and running extension cords in all weathers. Major bummer in a blizzard, but still doable. The second issue is that a run that small won't last long for hens. Chickens are land sharks and will eat everything including the earth. They will scratch out a deep wallow for dust baths and may actually dig out under a shallow foundation. If they also have a protected run outside of the greenhouse they will be happier. When chickens are too crowded they peck each other and really do a lot of damage to one another. I'm glad you brought this idea up though because I just bought a new flock of baby chicks and have them in the house (they're in the shower stall actually where they're safe from cats and cold) during the hard freeze. I can't really turn them out in the large yard any time soon because they're too small and it's still too cold. So I was thinking about moving my brooder into the greenhouse. Thanks for the idea. Oh, yeah, another thing you may want to consider is installing an evaporative cooler to maintain moisture and temps in the summer. A vent system is essential in a greenhouse with fans to push out the hot air that rises. And with chickens you will have excessive methane gas from droppings that could be a real problem without effective vents. I'm sure others more experienced than me will have good inputs. I've had chickens for several years, but the greenhouse went in just last May, so I'm still figuring out everything about it. The biggest mistake I made was not having the water right in the middle of the greenhouse. And it needed to be on a standpipe at least 3' high. Mine is as the far end from the door and the spigot is at floor level. That will have to be changed this summer. Check out the greenhouse forum before you start building, those guys know everything about them. Cheryl

You make several excellent points, Steve. I appreciate the feedback. If none of these work out, I'll fall back on a 10'X12' Cedar-Built, which would probably be better functionally than all of these, but I just love the look of an octagon. I have a border with giant curves and a circular vegie garden in the center, so an octagon would fit in visually so well. One thing I'm trying to do is prove that a garden designed for birds, insects, and native plants can be beautiful as well. It would give me so much pleasure just to look at a beautiful gazebo among the lupines. I remember reading that one gazebo somewhere had a skylight option, and at least one vents at the roof, but I can't seem to find those in all my bookmarked pages. I've e-mailed all the sellers a list of questions, and I'm putting all the info into a comparison chart. Some give a wind rating, so I'll add that to my list to ask about. "Fortunately," I can't afford it for a year, so there's plenty of time to research it all. I'd like to use the GH as much as possible, almost year-round. I envision attempting the system Eliot Coleman writes about. I'd like to start seeds to plant out later, perhaps leave tomatoes inside all summer to protect them from the deer, add some long-season plants like peppers and melons, and start a second cool-season crop (maybe start them outdoors) to overwinter in the GH. It doesn't need to be fancy or pretty or roomy or comfortable inside for people, though. I'm wondering if an unglazed roof could be a net benefit, catching the winter sun but avoiding the hottest, most direct rays of summer. If insulated and vented, it could also help moderate temperatures in winter or summer. I'm interested in some solar panels to mount on the roof, like the 45-watt 12"X36" panel kits from Harbor Freight, to power a fan and lights. I have heavy-duty extension cords and an outside receptacle if necessary. I don't want to heat the GH, except maybe with an electric heater in a rare cold spell. (Since I moved back to Montana in 2009, winters here have been incredibly mild compared to 30 years ago. One year an early freeze made the brown leaves stay on the trees all winter. It was in the 40s most days, with hardly any snow; like a very long November. We went two years without getting below zero. It's been in the 40s lately and a some hardy souls have been paddle-boarding on the river.) Forever Redwood, with the #5 gazebo, replied right away, and they'd help me customize it. They mentioned making sure a skylight doesn't leak. Their cupola isn't normally vented, but they could make it vent, and there are three small windows near the top of the walls that open. Their glazing is bronzed Lexan acrylic. They also offer a 10% annual mid-winter online purchase discount, and a 10% discount for waiting 12 weeks for delivery. And you can choose from 3 different heights of base wall (24", 30", 36"). They're looking like the favorite at the moment. The one in the #3 photo is a strong contender, because it's delivered fully assembled. Their site used the word "insulated," so I'm trying to find out what they meant. And, as you mention, they have the most glazing (on 5 of the walls). The one in the #1 photo allows you to pay extra to insulate roof, walls, or floor. And you can get a cedar interior finish. Thanks again for your suggestions.

zac- I've been quite satisfied with the oil-filled heater for my mild climate (Zone 8), and yours should be even better. It has two settings (750 W and 1500 W) and I have it on the 750 W setting with the thermostat at about 40F. Even though I've only got single pane glazing, the greenhouse is tight and the heater is able to maintain that temperature even on the low setting. As a safety precaution, I have a wireless thermometer that transmits to the house so I can check that the temperature is where I want it without having to go out with a flashlight at midnight! I also have an inexpensive, unvented, backup propane heater in case of an extended power outage (though I've never needed it). One other thought: a standard 15 amp circuit will trip at about 1800 W, so, if you run an electric heater at 1500 W and have other electrical stuff on that circuit, you could trip a breaker and lose power to the heater without possibly realizing it. seamommy- To lay my pavers, I actually excavated about 8" below finished floor height, then put in 4" of gravel and compacted it by hand, 2" of sand and compacted it by hand, and then laid in the 2" thick pavers and swept sand between the joints to lock them in. My perimeter foundation is about 2' deep (so that it's just below our frost line), and it's about a foot above grade. The advantage of a raised perimeter is that it effectively gives you more headroom. The process for doing the perimeter involved excavating down, and then putting in a 16" wide by 4" thick base (with a little rebar thrown in). Then I laid my courses of cinder block on top of the concrete base. When that was done, I dropped in some short pieces of rebar in the top holes and filled the voids with a soupy concrete mix to lock it all together. I then mortared on a decorative top course of colored concrete pavers and set my frame on that. The frame is set on caulking to keep out drafts, and is also bolted to the foundation. I also attached 1" thick styrofoam to the outside of the foundation to cut down on heat loss through the foundation. Here is what it looked like when I was almost done: I didn't put weed barrier in and haven't had any problems. Because I excavated for the perimeter foundation and excavated to prepare the floor, there wasn't any noticeable vegetation left under the footprint of the greenhouse, and nothing, including my blackberry vines, has returned in the 3 years I've had the greenhouse. The only slight problem I've had was last year when some ants started excavating sand out of the floor to make tunnels and I had to zap them with the little bait cans. If you are concerned about something growing back under a paver floor, barrier fabric would likely be a good insurance policy. If you went with an entirely poured perimeter foundation, that would work fine, too. I just didn't want to have to build forms and pay the minimum for the cement truck and pumper to come in. I managed fine with my little cement mixer for the concrete I did need and the mortar is easy to mix in a bucket. Good luck.

James, The Pat Lanza lasagna gardening books are good. I have two of them right here on my bookshelf: the original one called simply "Lasagna Gardening" which was published in 1998 and then Pat Lanza's follow-up book "Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces", which was published in 2002. I haven't read the third one, which is about "Lasagna Gardening with Herbs". One thing to remember when you read about the lovely layering method of building beds, which closely resembles sheet composting except you're layering purchased 'finished' ingredients instead of raw compost ingredients, is that you have to remove or otherwise deal with the bermuda grass first because you can't just build a bed on top of bermuda grass. So, even though the book is very good and quite inspriring, you have to know it doesn't work equally well in every geographic region of the country and building a lasagna bed in our part of the country requires you to remove drought-tolerant, aggressive grasses like bermuda which makes the method more difficult and more time-consuming than it sounds when you read the book. In the book, the author suggests you just lay several thicknesses of newspaper on top of the sod and build a lasagna bed right there on top of it, and you know that will never work with bermuda grass. Another thing to remember is that lasagna gardening is just a new name given to an old method. Ruth Stout was using a method that she called the no-work mulch gardening method decades before Pat Lanza wrote the lasagna gardening books, and I'm not saying that to dispect Pat Lanza, but merely to point out that there really isn't anything new under the sun. I consider lasagna gardening just a fancier, more modern form of no-till, mulch gardening and probably found Ruth Stout's book "The No-Work Garden Book" just as helpful in its own way as Pat Lanza's books. I think you'd enjoy Pay Lanza's "Lasagna Gardening" book as long as you remember that her easy method just isn't as easy for those of us with bermuda grass, but think you'd find Ruth Stout's book just as helpful. The best two gardening books of this century, in my opinion, are relatively new ones. "Edible Landscaping" by Rosalind Creasy, which was published in Nov. 2011, is simply amazing. I've read many of Ms. Creasy's other books, and have been waiting years for her to write this one. She covers everything you'd ever want to know about creating a landscape that blends edibles with ornamentals and she knows what she's talking about because she's been doing this kind of gardening for several decades. The book is big, full of photos and is very detailed. It also is very inspiring. The second book I'd recommend to anyone and everyone who wants edible gardening to be a part of their life was written by Barbara Pleasant and is, hands down, the best book on getting started in vegetable gardening I've ever seen, even if you've never gardened before. It is called "Starter Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Vegetable Gardens". It has specific plans and designs for specific gardens, and shows how garden designs progress from the first year to the second and so on. It is wonderful and is great not only for new gardeners but for experienced ones as well as the author provides so much info that is so helpful. An older book that is highly revered by many gardeners is Dick Raymond's "Joy of Gardening". Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the newer books that we forget the older ones. Another book that's been around a decade or so is Ed Smith's "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible". Although he is more of a traditional row gardener, the book is outstanding. If you want to grow as much of your own food as you possibly can on the amount of space you have available, I highly recommend John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine". This is a very complex book, full of charts with all kinds of data and statistics, but it does a great job of teaching people how to use biointensive techniques to grow huge yields. It is not, however, about no-till style gardening. It is sort of the opposite as one of its basic tenets is that you use double digging and adding lots of amendments to build each bed. I use his plant spacing techniques, but don't do the double digging, choosing instead to build raised beds above ground and leave the big task of double-digging to people who are younger and more ambitious than I. A more simplified form of biointensive gardening is Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening". This book and technique have been around for a long time now....long enough that there has been a revised edition of the book published in the last few years. If you want to use a greenhouse, cold frame, high tunnel or low tunnel to raise cool-season crops in the winter, you can't go wrong with "Four Season Harvest" by Eliot Coleman or by his newer book, "Winter Harvest Handbook". Those are some of my ideas about books that you might find helpful. The style of gardening I engage in now is a blend of several different techniques and the books I listed above all contributed a lot to the way that I do things. As with all gardening techniques, you have to experiment to find what works best for you in your soil and your climate. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Four Season Harvest