Cattle Panel Green House

Up here in the Peace Country the growing season always seems to be about two weeks to short for the garden.

The solution seems to be a green house. We looked around at the commercially available kits which are way over priced for what you get, and decided we could build our own.

I spent a lot of time researching how to build a green house out of CPVC pipe even got so far as making up a list of fittings and pipe required to cover our existing 8′ x 16′ raised vegetable garden, when my wife came across a post on Pintrest about using cattle panels to make a green house.  The panels are made from 1/4″ galvanized wire that is spot welded at the factory to form 16′ x 4′ 4″ panels.

The local farm store had the panels in stock so I bought 4 and got them delivered to the house.

Now for the construction.

Our existing garden is made from 4″ landscape ties so I started by screwing 2x2s down on the top of the long sides roughly flushed up with the out side of the landscape ties.

To form the roof, I placed on end of the first panel against the inside of one of the 2x2s I just finished attaching then slowly raised the middle of the panel and walked the other end in until it could be wedged against the other 2×2, forming and arch. After flushing up the first panel with the end of the garden I secured the ends to the 2x2s with deck screws. The next panels I did the same process over lapping them by roughly 4″ so by the time the forth panel was in place it was flush with the other end of the garden.

The next step is to build your end frames, since was my first attempt it was a lot of playing around to get every thing square.

I built on to the basic frame to provide some where to attach the end poly to with lath (thin strips of wood) When I attached poly I started from the bottom and worked up the extra I folded over the second cross bar in on the panels and tie wrapped it the panel.

To cover the top I reused some poly I had from the kids skating rink and cut it to 18′ x 16′. I had a couple pieces of chain link top rail laying around that were more then long enough to attach across the 16′ wide ends. To attach the poly I rolled the poly around the pipes once then used Tuck tape to secure it.

Then with the help of a buddy I dragged one pipe and poly over the green house, then rolled up the poly on both pipes evenly until the poly was tight.

I finished the doors with windows that open down for ventilation. So far it’s worked great.