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Message Subject How I grow food year-round despite harsh winters
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
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Just where are your "harsh" Winters?
Anywhere that you can "dig down" a couple feet and achieve some geothermal heating is a very mild climate indeed; or you're siting your greenhouse over or near an active geyser.

Plenty of places with "harsh" Winters require 5' or more burial depth for water/waste piping, just so the liquids won't freeze. If the pipe has continuous water content, like a water supply line, the pipe has to be insulated a couple layers before it is buried, and likely buried closer to 8' or 10'.
 Quoting: Lester 35595779

I live in Kansas, so harsh here = -10F to -15F

It's true that the frost line goes down a bit IF you're just talking about bare open land. But we're not. We're talking about building a greenhouse over that land, digging down to yield a pit, AND insulating it very well. Those are very important considerations, and they explain why I have success.

Got much gravel or rock content to your soil? Unless you line your pit with 6 mil plastic and probably use styrfoam insulation on either side of the plastic sheeting, you're just making a conduit pathway for "frigid" air that exists in the loose soil. Rocky soils don't pack, air pockets exist in the soil and they freeze quickly and solidly. Like making your pit in a glacier and expecting a geothermal effect...
 Quoting: Lester 35595779

I did insulate underneath my high tunnel aquaponics system with styrofoam. You're not the only person to have thought of such things.

And the explanation for why I don't bother with bottom insulation in the semi-pit tunnel is touched on above: the heat trapped by the greenhouse plus the heat coming up from the soil, even in my extremely sandy region, is more than enough to totally overwhelm the frigid air flowing down through the "conduits" in between the grains.


What's it cost to heat your outbuilding/greenhouse? What's it cost to build it right?
 Quoting: Lester 35595779

$0/year to heat for general food production (which I find to be pretty affordable). Well, if we count the inflation fans that provide insulation, then it's about 10 cents per day. I only provide extra heat if I want to jack the water temps up over 80F and breed the fish during the winter.

My first winter with my high tunnel aquaponics system I was not breeding...so I left it entirely without electrical heat. The lowest the water temps got were into the low 50's (F).

Good design/engineering eliminates almost all need for electricity.

So I guess I'd say that these simple 1st generation systems are already built right enough to kick ass. And at very little cost: $2,500 for the high tunnel aquaponics system, $1,500 for the semi-pit tunnel system.


You talk about Tilapia as if that trash fish were a fine meal. Catfish, trout, salmon; those are quality meats. Tilapia is just a recent resource the fish mongers can still sell halfway cheap. Nobody who knows fish wants to eat that shit, so why grow it?
 Quoting: Lester 35595779


The quality of tilapia meat is determined greatly (as it is with all fish) by the environment it is raised in and by what the animals are fed. Since I grow mine in pristine conditions with extremely healthy diets, they taste as good as or better than any native gamefish I've ever had (bass, crappie, catfish, etc)...and I've had a lot. My tilapia taste 10 times better than the best catfish I've ever had. Sounds like you've just never had clean tilapia.

As for why to grow tilapia? Because I'm going at this from a subsistence point of view, not a high class point of view. Tilapia have the best feed conversion ratios and are extremely robust (as long as the water is kept warm enough for them), making them very easy for the average person to raise. Common feed conversion ratios for tilapia are darn near 1:1 (so a pound of feed is converted into almost a pound of fish weight). Mine are even better: I get about 3 pounds of growth for every pound of feed I give them...because I create ecosystems that naturally produce an abundance of forage for them, especially algae. Since my blue tilapia are almost entirely vegetarian, and since they love algae, I only really give them extra commercial feed as more of a nutritional supplement as opposed to being a primary sustenance. Not only does that make for inexpensive growing, it makes for far healthier meat on the dinner table, since commercial feeds have all sorts of nasty things that bio-accumulate in farmed fish like salmon, trout, catfish, etc that rely almost exclusively on commercial feed when grown commercially.


There is no free-lunch in frigid climes. You got routine overnite lows of -10F or much lower, you don't waste time looking for nonexistent geothermal gains. Insulation don't make heat, it just preserves what you have.

Maybe you have some kind of Korean underground ducting for moving the furnace exhaust from your house and route it so it heats the pad of your greenhouse? That would be scavenging and pretty efficient. Not too practical if your GH is more than 15' from your house & exhaust vent. Like some of the Rocket Stoves, but doubtful you're using anything renewable or home brewed to heat your home. Heat is serious stuff if you live where it is really cold...
 Quoting: Lester 35595779

You sound like Baghdad Bob. I'm not telling you untested theory, I'm telling you what I've already been successfully doing for years now. My original background was in engineering and physics, and I designed these systems to do what they are in fact doing.


Since I took the time to respectfully reply to you despite your caustic comments, will you alter your tone going forward?
 
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