11 Jul Why We Build Our Greenhouses with Macrocarpa Timber 🌲

Because we love to grow our fruit and vegetables without any nasty pesticides, an eco friendly environment is also really important to us and so we imagine also important to other too! We find untreated Macrocarpa timber the best choice to build our Nutopia timber greenhouses with. The timber smells awesome and its nice to build with too.  The small downside of buying locally milled timber (we literally go to our guys home to pickup our orders, and have a cuppa in his cabin style house that is lined with Macrocarpa, yes it smells epic and is so cosy), is that the lengths aren’t perfectly uniform as you would find at your local Mitre 10, but this isn’t an issue as we cut it down to the sizes we need and dress it if needbe ourselves. For undressed orders it’s left raw (except for one side of the timber which is cut) and it will naturally silver really nicely over time. Personally I love the silvered look.

Here’s a rundown of the reasons we choose Macrocarpa.

Eco friendly – no treatment required

Macrocarpa is arguably the most eco-friendly timber milled in New Zealand.  It smells really nice and because of the natural oils in the timber it does not need to be treated as it has natural durability similar to H3.1 treated pine.

Locally milled

Our Macrocarpa timber is milled locally with the logs been sourced from farms in our wider area – northern Hawkes Bay. This means that (aside from the small amount of Radiata Pine base timber we use) we aren’t contributing massively to erosion around our country. And we love supporting a local miller up the road 🙂

Longevity

Although Macrocarpa has been recorded as lasting 10 – 15 years in the ground, just to be safe we attach a layer of H4 treated Pine to the bottom of the walls and garden beds (bottom plates) so that there is a solid barrier between the Macrocarpa timber and any moisture or dampness coming from the ground. It is also well protected from the Polycarbonate cladding so the only moisture comes from watering your plants.

Color

We love the colour of Macrocarpa, it has light browny/honey colour and nice natural texture when dressed and/or stained. Over time if the timber is not stained the colour will slowly fade to a soft silver/grey colour.

Check out our Greenhouses here