"Vinyl siding is the mulch of buildings..."

"Vinyl siding is the mulch of buildings." - My Dad.

Truer words were never spoken.  On the mend from a uncharacteristically debilitating shoulder-injury, this weekend found my father back in action up at the farm, if not exactly 100%.  Despite having only three good arms, our goal was to get as much vinyl siding up on the greenhouse as possible.  The materials were already on-site.  The weather seemed ready to cooperate.  As usual, I did most of the work but he's the only one in the pictures because he's terrible at operating any form of camera device..

We spent Saturday morning fighting off the frosty air by bending and installing a whole bunch of garden trellis supports on the raised beds.  I learned how to consistently bend 1/2" emt using a conduit bender for the first time.  So now, by the time this year's peas and beans are poking out, they'll have an 8'x6' span of netting to climb to their little heart's content.  Speaking of, I managed to plant 16' of Tall Telephone Peas (which might be one or two generations away from deserving their own varietal name as I've continued selecting out for the huge mutant peas/pods that began appearing last year) and a first-attempt 8' row of Green Beauty snow peas from Adaptive Seeds, especially notable for being a true vining variety.  They're going in awfully late for peas, but we only got the raised beds filled last weekend.  What can I say?  We're doing the best we can.

The properties of vinyl siding are deceptively ingenious, and the stuff goes up relatively quickly once you get the hang of it.  By Sunday night we felt like siding pros, and had managed to get the entire north side of the greenhouse and most of both of the ends covered in the stuff.

The hardest part is successfully tacking it in with short little roofing nails in a manner that doesn't involve smashing your fingers with the hammer.  I got better at that too as we went along, but the middle finger on my left hand remains sad nonetheless.

Due to some warpage of posts and boards (lord, how I loathe pressure treated pine for this reason) our walls were not plumb-straight, but the application of the vinyl siding really smoothed things out visually.  One more good working day, and we should be done with the vinyl and on to the really intimidating part... installing the polycarbonate panels.