Last Updated on August 15, 2023
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read our update toward the end of this post about our experience seeking warranty service for this greenhouse.
I make several trips to the garden center every spring and summer to buy plants, seed packets, and more to get my garden going for the year. After the garden center or hardware store, my go-to place for shopping for gardening supplies is Aldi.
The discount grocer sells a wide variety of gardening supplies every spring and summer. During any given week, you may find Aldi stocking solar garden lights, stacking planters, mini raised planters, wooden raised planters, wooden box planters, plant shelves, potting benches, and more.
Aldi also rotates greenhouses of different sizes through its stores each season. There are large greenhouses such as the Gardenline Walk-In Greenhouse, and mid-sized greenhouses such as the Gardenline 4-Tier Greenhouse or the Gardenline Drop Over Greenhouse. Then, Aldi sells some slightly smaller greenhouses such as this one, the Gardenline Mini Drop Over Greenhouse.
The Gardenline Mini Drop Over Greenhouse (Product Code: 811175) cost $19.99 at the time of publication.
This is an Aldi Find, which means it’s only in stores for a short time. Each Aldi store gets just one shipment of Aldi Finds like these, and once they sell out, that’s it until the next year, if Aldi decides to bring it back next year. Aldi does not offer online ordering for products that aren’t in stock at your local store.
The back of the box. (Click to enlarge.)
Here’s more information on the mini drop over greenhouse:
- Dimensions: 34.64″ long x 22.83″ wide x 32.28″ tall
- Protects garden from pests and weather
- Designed for temporary propagation of herbs, flowers, and vegetables
- Easy to assemble; no tools required
- Features a powder-coated steel frame with plastic connectors
- Includes a zippered roll-up front window with Velcro flaps for easy plant access and ventilation
- Comes with a storage bag for holding the greenhouse when it’s not in use
- Made in China
This greenhouse comes with a three-year warranty serviced by Protel, which is a common Aldi warranty service provider.
I picked up one of these mini drop over greenhouses because it’s the perfect size to fit inside one of my raised garden beds. I plan to use it in the spring to get seeds started directly in the garden bed without worrying about squirrels digging things up, which is a major challenge where I live.
Another challenge I’ve faced in the past with greenhouses such as the Aldi Gardenline 4-Tier Greenhouse is that plants quickly outgrow the small pots I use to start seeds in. With this drop over greenhouse placed directly on a garden bed, I don’t have that problem. Of course, you could also position this greenhouse over potted plants on the ground or on a patio or deck, too.
Greenhouses of this type — with green plastic coverings — don’t generally allow you to start plants much earlier in the season than usual, but they might give you a head start of a few weeks. With similar greenhouses I’ve used, I’ve estimated that the temperature inside on a sunny day might reach 10 degrees warmer than the outside air temperature, while on a cold, cloudy day, the inside temperature might be pretty similar to the outside temperature.
I’m not the most gifted person when it comes to spatial skills, but assembly was easy and took just a few minutes.
I really like that this comes with a simple cloth storage bag. I own several other Aldi greenhouses, and I don’t always have easy or efficient ways to store the other greenhouses when they’re disassembled and not in use. I typically put the pieces in a large plastic tote with a lid, but there’s a lot of wasted space. I was able to fit this entire disassembled greenhouse in the storage bag, including the plastic cover. You’ll need to be careful while inserting the cover because you don’t want to puncture it with any of the metal bars.
The greenhouse has a good amount of space inside it and is big enough to start quite a few seedlings. It stands nearly 33 inches tall and is nearly 3 feet long by nearly 2 feet wide. It’s tall enough to accommodate larger plants, but it’s not so deep that you will have trouble weeding or tending to plants in the bottom.
Unlike all the other Aldi greenhouses I’ve purchased, this greenhouse does not come with metal stakes to help secure it to the ground in case of wind gusts. I feel like that’s a fairly significant oversight on the part of Aldi, but it’s easy to fix. I’ll add some metal garden staples or stakes to the bottom to help secure it on windy days.
I have no need for a greenhouse currently, since temperatures in my area have been in the 90s lately, so I’ll be packing this up in its included storage bag for now. I’ll bring it back out early next spring, and I can’t wait to start using it in my raised garden bed. I’ll update this post as necessary with new developments.
UPDATE (8/15/2023) — This greenhouse style works well with my garden setup, so I bought two more. I didn’t open them until the next gardening seasoning, though, which I regret because one greenhouse was missing a necessary connector piece. I emailed Protel, which is a common Aldi warranty service provider, about getting the missing piece. They didn’t have any spare parts but offered me a refund, which is often the case with Aldi products that have warranties.
However, they never sent the refund. Protel said in an email that they would send it via PayPal, and I gave them my PayPal information twice and followed up in a series of emails, and they reiterated they would send the refund, but we kept going around with the same dialogue and the refund never showed up in my PayPal account. It’s a German-based company, and while we communicated in English via email, I’m not sure if we were misunderstanding each other due to translation issues or if the problem was due to something else.
I wasn’t getting anywhere emailing them, so I ended up rigging a solution for the missing connector piece by using some flexible plastic-coated gardening wire from a local hardware store. It’s not pretty, but once I put the cover over the greenhouse, you can’t tell that it’s jerry-rigged.
My lesson learned is to always open the box right away to check that all parts are there and in working order, because if I had done that, I probably could have exchanged the greenhouse while it was still in stock at my local Aldi stores.
The Verdict:
The Gardenline Mini Drop Over Greenhouse stands nearly 33 inches tall and is nearly 3 feet long by nearly 2 feet wide. It features a zippered flap with Velcro straps so you can access plants and also ventilate the greenhouse on warm days. This is one of the smaller greenhouses Aldi sells, but it will fit nicely in one of our raised garden beds, and we’re looking forward to using it. Our only caveat is that we had difficulty getting help from the company that services the warranty for this greenhouse.
