How I grow food year-round despite harsh winters

*snip*
Not like anyone living in a "harsh climate" could use your plan.

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.

Why create that which you can steal?

Yours is mine.

Keep building.

I come for it soon.

Hey OP, how did you anchor the PVC struts into the berm that you built? Did you just push them in the ground at an angle?

I bought 10' lengths of EMT metal conduit (sold right beside the pvc pipes at places like Home Depot), cut them in half into 5' segments, and then hammered them 3' deep into the ground at an angle (angled toward the pit) so that the pvc could slip right onto them without much trouble.

I didn't have any problems until I ordered some infested citrus trees from California. Then I got sooty mold (which grows on white fly poop).

My solution was to get a concentrated jug of neem oil and go bonkers spraying. I think the jug was enough to fill 85 spray bottles (after diluting), and I think I probably went through a half dozen bottles, twice a week for a couple weeks. But after that the problem was over and they haven't been back.

It helps that I'm in Kansas, since there aren't wild white flies outside to keep re-colonizing my greenhouses (I think it gets too cold, like you suggested). So once they're gone, they're gone until I accidentally re-introduce them. But it's a different story in California.

If I were in California, I'd probably have to re-spray with neem oil every month. I'd probably look into biological controls, too. Maybe there's a good creature you could stock that would eat all the white flies? That's how it is with spider mites: you can just stock with good predatory mites, and they keep the bad spider mites under control.

I bought 10' lengths of EMT metal conduit (sold right beside the pvc pipes at places like Home Depot), cut them in half into 5' segments, and then hammered them 3' deep into the ground at an angle (angled toward the pit) so that the pvc could slip right onto them without much trouble.

Trout has a high amount of omega-3, Carp is quite low in comparison (as is Tilapia).

If any of you are interested, my local newspaper did a story on my tilapia/banana setup recently: [link to themercury.com] (unfortunately, they only give a blip and a pic for free, and charge $1.99 to read the whole thing)

I wish I hadn't been a sweaty mess when they stopped by, but it's not like I look all that much better when I clean up so I shouldn't complain.

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.

Why create that which you can steal?

Yours is mine.

Keep building.

I come for it soon.

Even if you did steal the facility for growing food without getting your ass shot to pieces, how are you even going to use it? You don't have the knowledge required to operate and maintain the system, nor the knowledge to grow the food, OR the will to obtain it.

Thieves are amazingly dumb and uncreative people. It is sort of like all the South African farms that were forcibly stolen from the white farmer. The thieves still starved because they didn't know what the fuck they were doing even though they had the farms.

*re-posted with formatting fixed*


Oh I'm well aware that there are many such folks. And not just the 'bad' people, either: almost all 'good' folks would also raid my family's property if their own kids were starving or dying from an improper diabetic diet. It's just a fact of life.

But rather than wage war on such folks, I decided that the better strategy would be to help everyone by creating the large-scale facilities that I mentioned in my last paragraph of the original post (I left it in the quote so you could see what I'm referring to).

The thinking is that by creating those large-scale systems, it eliminates the need to steal, since people will be able to just keep getting their food from there as usual. These big ~10acre facilities will be hardened and entirely off-grid, so they'll keep functioning through almost any calamity. And they'll be built all over everywhere, with the goal being that almost everybody would have access to a sufficient and constant supply of healthy, delicious, and nutritious real foods grown within 10 miles of where they live.

There's no reason for us serfs to make war with each other if we can just use our noggins to eliminate the problems before they arise. So I will indeed keep building toward that goal, because not only do I want my family to be well fed, I want you and yours to be well fed, too.

This is just awesome, OP! Thank you for sharing all this with us. I haven't looked at the whole thread or your website but I hope somewhere, you mention how you store the food, too!

Awesome job!!!! Thank you!

Thanks for the nice comments :)

I have yet to really get into storing what I grow other than outdoor sweet corn, which I grow huge amounts of and freeze because I love it so much, and cucumbers, because I like pickles so much. Right now my whole focus is on how to provide sufficient fresh food 365 days/yr so that storage isn't needed.

That said, food storage is incredibly important, and I don't mean to knock it by being focused on year-round fresh food production. If you or anybody else has a good thread on food storage to recommend, please feel free to share it in this thread.

Do your tilapia reproduce to keep your population levels up?

Most excellent and inspiring post OP, so glad you posted here and that I didn't overlook it. THANKS!

Sure, I'll alter my tone....

-10/-15F you say, but rather doubtful you get that on a 24/7 basis for months or weeks on end. Correct?

Kind of clueless is my observation about what a "harsh" Winter is.

why not raise better quality fish?

What you write about here is useless to anyone in the Intermountain West, Canada, or further North. Might be useful in BC if on the Pacific side of the mountains; but nowehere that actually has a "harsh" Winter. Clueless.

There is no "geothermal" effect from ground soil.

Not like anyone living in a "harsh climate" could use your plan.

we have a similar system- but used horizontally cut barrels inside of pallet walls (insulated with plastic on both sides), instead of digging. Our pest control is FROGS. Ours is partially open most of the year, surrounded by a greenhouse fence frame for a trellis and greenhouse roof. The greenhouse walls are added for winter. Large barrels of water not only serve to water plants and frogs, but also as a thermal. Water is collected off the greenhouse roof into the barrels. Currently our system is 40 square feet of grow space, plus two indoor systems, and raised beds for root crops not under canopy. We hope to expand next season, another 40 feet. No elec used at all. It works great! And our pest control is self-sustaining and organic. They live inside the frame, which also has a 4 foot high insect screen around it, sitting just above the bed area. This allows pollination but limits insects to the frogs management ability. Also keeps baby frogs from hopping away.

OP, you and this guy have the same idea. He is doing this same type thing in his town in S. Africa and hopes to see it spread. I see it as a great way for everyone to transition from buying from the grocery stores to growing our own. Obviously, a lot of folks aren't prepared but those that are, will be able to help a lot of folks.

OP, I showed your link to a friend of mine. He wants to know:

1) how does he contain the water (one of the great advantages of aquaponics is the bacterial cycle which makes it all work and conserves water)

2) what keeps the gravel from compacting when he walks on it?

Thank you