house update/pool garden question

[bwhite829]

So, long time no post. its been a hot summer with very little gardening. My container garden at the apt was a failure and I won't be doing much gardening @ my grandparens for a while. with gas being as high as it is now and my crazy schedule, its costing too much to make the drive as much as I want to and I'm just too busy. well, update on the house too: we might or might not be building. we decided we are also looking for house foreclosure/short sales in areas that qualify for rural development loans.

we found one that we are going to look at tomorrow and its got an old pool, and neither of us have too much desire to have a pool. my mom has one and its just a pain to keep up, so we were thinking about filling it w/ concrete and making an outdoor kitchen area out of it, then I saw some articles about people who converted it to a greenhouse. I think that'd be doable, and I think it might be cheaper than filling it w/ concrete or building a greenhouse. What are you guys's opinions about this? and its good to be on the forum again

[rainbowgardener]

Welcome back...

I don't think you could possibly fill it with concrete. That would be so many tons of concrete and it would have to be built up layer by layer or the stuff at the bottom would never cure...

Definitely the bottom would have to be well broken up for drainage or the yard would turn into a swamp. I think usually what they do then is break up the sides and use the pieces to help fill in the hole.

After that you would truck in fill dirt and gravel and then a layer of topsoil. If you wanted a concrete patio, you could skip the topsoil and just lay concrete on top of the fill.

But this all adds up to thousands of $$...

Making it a greenhouse is an interesting idea. People are doing it:

https://gardenpool.org/