Fall is here, the temps are getting to freezing st night and we are finally doing an update on our greenhouse for winter gardening. We have the hardy and moderately hardy crops in our greenhouse and we are about to begin testing it. This first winter we are going to be growing cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, beets, radish, beans, spinach, kale and chard. We still have some unused space left. For it we are considering carrots, collard greens and turnips. We also have some herbs growing in our winter gardening greenhouse, basil dill and cilantro.
As the temperatures begin to drop we will start the process of buttoning up greenhouse in preparation of keeping it warm enough to allow us to grow a winter garden all the way through until spring.
To accomplish this, we have built this greenhouse with a 95 ton rock heat sink under the soil inside the foot print of the greenhouse. The rock heat sinks serves as a thermal mass, and we hope it is going to allow us to keep the greenhouse temps close enough to freezing at night that our hardy crops will still survive.
During the day, the heat is drawn from the peak of the greenhouse and pushed back through the heat sink. This will be our first year testing it, so be sure to subscribe so you can follow our journey as we find out what this system will do.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes for you.
It's way too cold up here in the winter to be able to use my greenhouse all winter without active heating. The amount of heating I would need to use makes it not worth doing.
How deep does the frost go into the ground where you live?
It goes about 2-3 feet deep here depending on the snow cover that we get. The more snow cover we get, the less frost depth.
I am also interested in how this will work. Our frost easily goes to 4' each winter. Makes for a lovely long mud season in spring...
Hope to see more posts on this greenhouse! Intriguing!
We can get frost below 3 feet, typically we bury our waterlines at 4 foot. We have isolated the heat sink from the cold outside soil with sytrofoam. It goes all the way around the rock to a depth of 6 feet. The foam is 4 inches thick and is inside the ground poles that holds up the arches.
That is excellent to know! That should work.
Just this morning someone offered a 7' x 15' hoophouse on BuyNothing. I wonder....
Are you in an area that freezes in the winter? We haven't had our greenhouse long, but we did have a single layer of plastic on the side walls for several months. Doubling up all the plastic layers made a significant increase in our over night greenhouse temps.
Yes, we freeze alright, down to -25F most winters. Ground freezes 4' down.
That's cold! Then for sure a single double layer of greenhouse plastic would serve your needs better than a single layer found on moat hoop houses.
Our frost line can get down below 3 feet, depending on the winter. We have Styrofoam 4 inches thick that does down 6 feet all the way around our rock heat sink. That Styrofoam is inside of the poles that hold the arches upright. This is keeping the cold soil from outside the greenhouse from cooling off our soil inside the greenhouse. It helps to isolate the heat sink and keep it warm.
That's a really good idea!
Lovely to have a greenhouse for winter so that you can keep your food growing.
We are very excited about it. Even if our experiment fails, we will significantly extend our growing season with the greenhouse. A longer growing season means rmore food at the end of the year.
Absolutely - I wish you every success.
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