How I grow food year-round despite harsh winters

Here's a link to Going Bananas, it's a fun site to look through: [link to www.going-bananas.com]

I have been reading through all the posts and I am so impressed! Now I will go study the links too. We have a space where we could put up a setup like this that is shaded in the summer but in sunlight in winter that would be a good place for something like this..

My hat's off to you OP!

cool, I'd like to try this! :)

The growbed is higher than the water level in the fish tank, and I have a hole in the side of the fish tank wall so that water from the grow bed can flow downhill through that hole and back into the fish tank, making a small waterfall.

I use the reflective material primarily to bounce light down into the water/gravel in front of it, which allows me to capture and hold more heat. It's for helping to keep the system's temp up as high as possible in the winters, but I leave it up in the summer because it's a hassle to take down and put back up. In the summer, the sun is high enough overhead that the light comes mostly straight down, so the reflectors don't do much reflecting in the summer. That let's me get away with leaving it in place without causing the system to overheat. But in the winters when the sun stays much lower, it catches and reflects the light.

I wanted to elaborate a bit on the geothermal heating benefits that you get by excavating a pit for the greenhouse.

In the winter, above-ground greenhouses are surrounded on both sides and the top by frigid air. The ground/floor isn't exposed to the frigid air, but much of the heat leaches out into the surrounding ground since that ground IS exposed to the frigid air; that means you end up with a cold floor inside the greenhouse, at least all the floor within, say, 10 feet of the outside walls. So unless you have a very long and very wide greenhouse, pretty much all of your ground/floor will be cooled in that manner.

By digging down into the earth, you get the following benefits:

1) Part of your walls turn into heaters. Instead of being exposed to frigid outside air, the bottom 3 feet of my walls are surrounded by soil that only drops down to about 45F even in the depths of winter when the outside air is -10F.

2) The floor no longer loses substantial heat to the surrounding area, since the surrounding dirt 3' down is 45F rather than being frozen solid like the surrounding dirt up at the surface.

This means that the floor and bottom 3' of my walls function as heaters in the dead of winter. When the outside air is -10F, my floor and the bottom 3' of my walls put out a limitless supply of 45F heat. That heat overwhelms the cold coming through the top of the greenhouse (the only part still exposed to the frigid air) and makes it impossible to freeze. That's why the lowest my air temps ever get in my greenhouse are in the 36F-39F range. The water in my pit greenhouse stays even warmer: the coldest it ever got was 45F, since it warms up enough during the day to carry through the short durations of cold 36-39F air that can occur in the middle of the night when it's -10F outside.


This type of passive geothermal heating is very valuable yet very easy to take advantage of. Hope my explanation made it more clear than it was before :)

That's very nice of you to say. Thank you :)

Last summer and fall I ate virtually all of my breakfasts and lunches directly out of the garden without even bringing the food inside! I really like cucumbers and absolutely love sweet corn, so I would just go pick them fresh and eat my meals as I walked around out there. Then for dinner I'd often have corn-on-the-cob, fried or baked zucchini, and fried or baked fish.

In the winters I have GIANT salads every day, sometimes twice a day. I love spinach, and I grow more than we can possibly eat, but I certainly try to eat as much as I can! And all the leftover greens get thrown into the fish tank and turn into clean white meat. It's awesome how blue tilapia convert algae and extra garden greens/vegetables into tasty filets. And their feed-conversion ratio is unbelievable, since they just float around all day without having to expend energy fighting gravity like land animals do.

My grocery bill has dropped drastically from all this...as has my waist line! And I feel so much healthier, too. I definitely highly recommend it.

Now I'm hungry :)

My high tunnel aquaponic garden was previously featured on C2C back in 2011 shortly after I had built it: [link to www.coasttocoastam.com]

I'm writing to share an update because my project has expanded to such a degree--and in such strange directions--that I think a lot of you will be fascinated by what I'm doing and will hopefully be inspired to create your own systems.

I now not only grow huge amounts of blue tilapia (more than enough to feed my family), I successfully grow lots of edible bananas, figs, and other tropical crops here in Kansas...using almost no electricity or complex technology.

My main goal has been to figure out how to grow healthy 'real' food year-round in a state with harsh winters. My first system, the one featured on C2C, accomplished this via what I call high tunnel aquaponics. Here is a brief pictorial tour showing how that system progressed from 'boring' vegetables into a rainforest burgeoning with bananas and papayas: [link to www.greenfingardens.com] . That system satisfied my goal fairly well and was fairly inexpensive ($2,500 to build myself), but it was more complicated than most folks would want to manage, so I tried to come up with a better system that more people could adopt.

My second year-round food production system is far simpler and even more productive: a well insulated semi-pit tunnel greenhouse that is very cheap ($1,500 to build myself), extremely robust (withstanding winds in the 70-80 mph range on a half-dozen occasions), easy to manage, and, most important, amazingly productive. Even without heating, the lowest the temperature got in there this past winter was 39F...despite three separate polar vortexes that plunged our outdoor air temps to -10F. That allows me to not only grow enough vegetables over the winter to feed a small army (especially stuff like lettuce, spinach, beets, and even sweet potatoes), but to also grow fun tropical and semi-tropical crops like bananas and figs. Sure the bananas stop growing for a few months and die back a bit in the dead of winter, but they come roaring back in the spring because it just doesn't get cold enough to do substantial damage to them. What's more, this makes for a perfect environment for safely raising native fish like catfish year-round. The only power this system really needs is a measly 40 watts to power a small inflation fan that inflates the space between the two layers of greenhouse plastic. This inflation not only creates an extremely effective layer of insulation, it provides rigidity to the plastic, causing wind to slide over it rather than whip and shred it. Here's a pictorial tour that shows the construction and the various crops I've grown in there: [link to www.greenfingardens.com]

These are just simple test systems, but they have been amazingly productive. Hopefully they'll inspire other folks to create their own such systems...or even better systems!

My Dad is Type 2 diabetic, and I started this project primarily as a means to help keep him healthy if he were unable to get his meds for an extended period. It then quickly expanded into a search for a good answer to the question, "How can we keep everyone well-fed regardless of circumstances, whether it's war, pandemics, economic collapse, power grid failure, EMP's, shipping breakdowns, solar flares, peak oil, radical climate change, nuclear meltdowns, etc?" I don't know when or if most of those things will occur, but I sincerely believe that there are simple--and easily scalable--methods for safeguarding ourselves against them, at least from a food-production standpoint. If people lose access to food, society will disintegrate; but if we can all remain well-fed in a calamity, that gives us a good chance at not just surviving it, but thriving in spite of it.

That's why my big-picture goal is to create arrays of decent sized (~10 acre) highly intensive off-grid greenhouse food production facilities, arranged in satellite fashion around communities, that can provide a complete and exceptionally healthy diet that is entirely produced within a few miles of where it is eaten. Virtually anything can be grown in this manner by tailoring the design of each greenhouse to naturally provide the specific environmental needs of whatever is being grown in it. This style of hyperlocalized food production would not only allow folks to have direct and constant access to healthier food (no need for GMO's in our pampered greenhouse environments, for example), we'd get far tastier food, since we'd grow the best tasting varieties rather than the best shipping varieties, and we'd pick them when they're ripe rather than when they'd ship the best.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Hope it can be helpful to some of you.

Thank you!

My first attempt at inflation was with pure wind-powered inflation (I once saw a pic of an Amish fellow's contraption of that type), but it didn't work well enough, so now I use electric squirrel cage fans. The fan kits are ~$140 and use around 10 cents of electricity per day.

I wonder if it would work here, in Estonia too?

In summer it is usually somewhere around 25°C (77F) and peak is like ~33°C (91F) and in the winter is is like -15°C (5F) and peak is somewhere near -30°C (-22F).

Trust me, nothing would have kept that rain out! We ALL suffered water-damage even in "dry" basements. We had 10 inches in one afternoon!

We were very lucky with no wind-damage this time, though! For that, we are grateful!

OP,
can you elaborate a little more on the double wall and inflating the greenhouse walls?

thanks.

OP- I live in Kansas as well, I would love to come and check out your Greenhouse, if you do that kind of thing.
Shurrie

I wanted to elaborate a bit on the geothermal heating benefits that you get by excavating a pit for the greenhouse.

In the winter, above-ground greenhouses are surrounded on both sides and the top by frigid air. The ground/floor isn't exposed to the frigid air, but much of the heat leaches out into the surrounding ground since that ground IS exposed to the frigid air; that means you end up with a cold floor inside the greenhouse, at least all the floor within, say, 10 feet of the outside walls. So unless you have a very long and very wide greenhouse, pretty much all of your ground/floor will be cooled in that manner.

By digging down into the earth, you get the following benefits:

1) Part of your walls turn into heaters. Instead of being exposed to frigid outside air, the bottom 3 feet of my walls are surrounded by soil that only drops down to about 45F even in the depths of winter when the outside air is -10F.

2) The floor no longer loses substantial heat to the surrounding area, since the surrounding dirt 3' down is 45F rather than being frozen solid like the surrounding dirt up at the surface.

This means that the floor and bottom 3' of my walls function as heaters in the dead of winter. When the outside air is -10F, my floor and the bottom 3' of my walls put out a limitless supply of 45F heat. That heat overwhelms the cold coming through the top of the greenhouse (the only part still exposed to the frigid air) and makes it impossible to freeze. That's why the lowest my air temps ever get in my greenhouse are in the 36F-39F range. The water in my pit greenhouse stays even warmer: the coldest it ever got was 45F, since it warms up enough during the day to carry through the short durations of cold 36-39F air that can occur in the middle of the night when it's -10F outside.


This type of passive geothermal heating is very valuable yet very easy to take advantage of. Hope my explanation made it more clear than it was before :)

i'm in mass and the winds from the storm the day BEFORE arthur destroyed my neighbor's green house. (his was plastic)

i've seen so many destroyed green houses in mass.

especially glass ones.

but i don't see why kansas wouldn't be just as stormy or stormier.

not much you can do about a micro burst, i think one came through here.

Kansas...


How many weeks out of the year do your temps stay below -0- 24hrs a day?
Probably none.

You live on the prairie? You got wind problems and windchill factors, but not like your ground freezes to 5' depth and stays frozen from Oct to June.

You have no clue about what "harsh" really means...