the circus act

Now that I have some spare time (yes it has happened) I’ll be digging into my picture archives and clearing out a bunch of post ideas I’ve been saving. This is the start of the series…

Farms are infamous for their stories of dangerous tools and things to do. We are no exception. One of the scariest and probably most dangerous things we can do here is to work on the glass panels that make up our greenhouse structure. There has been a panel that was broken quite some time back and replaced with a polycarbonate sheet. That sheet had broken down in the sun and was ready to collapse at any time.

The panels are 6′x12′ tempered glass. They are really heavy and hard to move around. Our first attempt at this was done by carrying the panel inside the greenhouse and lifting up up and through the hole. It was a huge lift that nearly exhausted us before we even got the glass up and outside where it needs to be.

Once you get the panel up on top, the procedure is to push the leading edge into a channel on the top then slowly lower the bottom edge. This causes the panel to flex and curve which actually bends the glass to follow the form of the greenhouse structure. Any imperfection in the glass like a nick or a small speck of sand on the edge will spell disaster for the panel. I’m the lucky guy who holds the glass up from the bottom as it’s fit into the top channel since I am the only one tall enough to do it. Our first attempt exploded on my head. After all that time getting it up, boom it’s gone. We were all in quiet shock looking at what was left of it below us.

For the second attempt I got all new gaskets and we used the fork lift to hoist the glass from the outside hoping to minimize any chance for nicks. These pictures are from the second attempt. It worked fine, we flexed the huge panel into place, and sealed it up nice. As it turned out, it was also in the nick of time. That was the last Friday in October. The next day we had 12-16″ of wet heavy snow on the roof and a nice power outage to go with it. While the generator saga that ensued is a story for another time, we didn’t have to deal with a collapsed panel and cold and snow in the greenhouse.