You can buy a green house frame kit at a local home and garden store, or you order one from a company that specializes in them and have it shipped to you. Kits are available in many sizes and shapes, and you’ll easily find one that works in your backyard.

Green House Frame Kit Materials

Green house frames can be made of metal, plastic or wood. Obviously, some green house frame kits are sturdier than others. If your green house is to be a permanent structure, buy the best you can afford. Steel, heavy-duty aluminum and wood are the most durable. PVC frames can be sturdy, but plastic tends to get brittle with age and with heat-cold cycles. The life span of a plastic frame is about ten years, max.

Plastic and PVC frames are great for temporary green houses and cold frames, though. A simple collapsible plastic green house can extend your gardening season a month in the spring and a month in the fall. You can erect the green house frame kit right over your garden space, and collapse it for storage when the weather warms up.

Coverings

Green house frame kits come with some kind of glass or plastic covering. It may be a simple heavy-duty plastic cover, or it could be tempered glass panels. Once again, if your structure is permanent, choose the best you can afford, but a plastic cover is adequate for a temporary green house over the garden.

Accessories

Your green house frame kit should come with everything you need to construct it, including gaskets, seals, trim pieces, screws, nuts and bolts and/or fasteners. Most come with some way to vent the green house, even if it is only a flap that you can open. It’s nice when vents are screened to keep bugs out.

You may want to make sure that the covering of your green house offers the plants some UV protection to keep them from getting burned on sunny days.

If you plan to use the green house year round, you will probably need some kind of heater and grow lights. The green house will extend your growing season without the addition of heat and light, but if you want to use it in the winter you will need them, unless you live in a very mild climate. Even there, you may need to use grow lights to compensate for the shorter days of winter.