Greenhouse: Broken panes and dragonfly glass

What do you with glass that looks like it came from dragonfly wings? There are all sorts of things to do with it actually. This glass will probably go into the creation of a sealed mural. Or perhaps it will be used to create a decorative pressed glass wall. That would be where you take to panes of glass and arrange bits of broken glass between them in a pattern to form a thicker decorative wall or door panel. Whatever we decide to do with it we’ll have plenty of dragonfly glass to work with.

This is why. Yesterday Da Man went out to deal with one of the structural problems with the greenhouse. In this case a tree that had been grown from either a seed or volunteer seedling, but then allowed to grow in the greenhouse for far too long. This is one of those things that the Odd Handymen of yesteryear were supposed to have been dealing with, but decided they would rather not.

The tree eventually grew to a size where it competed with the structure of the greenhouse and pushed it’s way through the exterior wall, forcing a path between the glass wall panes and their wooden frames. Yay. So, when Da Man went to remove the tree he found there was no way to do so without the glass exploding into the greenhouse. It was safety glass, of course, so he wasn’t hurt, but it shredded the plastic sheeting on the other side of the greenhouse.

To make matters worse, one of the many reasons the tree needed to be taken out was so that I could get to the underbrush growing beneath it. Now all that dragonfly glass that exploded into the greenhouse has fallen down into said underbrush. Thank the maker of work gloves!

The glass pane was replaced within the hour, so at least that’s out of the way. That’s one of the reasons it’s always a good idea to get and keep extra panes when you build a real glass greenhouse. Especially if you live out in the middle of the boondocks like we do. Buying these panes in bulk is far less expensive than buying them one or two at a time. And when you live this far out it can take days to weeks to get replacement glass delivered.


Once the cleanup is done we’ll get to decide what to do with all that dragonfly glass. Today, however, we’re dawning work gloves and grabbing the bucket. Time to get off the computer and get to work!