Hello everyone! We are 2Boys1Homestead (Ben and Justin)! We are from a rural west Michigan town where we have a small 3 acre homestead. Currently we are incorporating Zone 1 into our homestead while also building the first section of a food forest. We are expanding as fast as we can to incorporate more permaculture principles! We are also currently fundraising to build a greenhouse for our Permaculture Plant Nursery where we will be growing and propagating plants, trees, fruits and seeds. If you want to check it out, you can here-> https://bit.ly/21hgvWY Currently we have employed some chickens and a few quails. We're hoping to add dairy goats and pigs within the next couple of years! This year we are employing pastured chickens as well!
Hi 2B1H and welcome! How did your greenhouse do (before it's demise) in the cold Michigan winters? I used some earth-sheltering techniques to moderate temperatures in the winter here and managed to keep the temps above freezing this winter past with only occasional use of the pellet stove. Good luck on your funding drive! I'll be reading more of your blog as time permits.
We didn't even get a chance to test it out. The storm took it out only 2 months after we put it in. It never even saw snow. I would like to try thermal mass heating with black barrels of water. Our other option is to use the earth-sheltering like you talked about. Maybe on one side or something. We're not 100% sure what we were gonna do. Hopefully, if we get the funding for this greenhouse, we can test out some of those and see what works the best. I would love to try the compost heating (huge compost pile with pipe running through it). I think that would be great!
I will highly recommend the water-filled barrels as thermal mass. I used them in my greenhouse experiment (https://permaculturenews.org/forums/index.php?threads/caliche-and-the-greenhouse.14504/ ) and that mass moderates the daily temperature swings dramatically. The earth berms are taking longer to complete, but the water mass itself has worked extremely well.
Wow! What an awesome project! It would be amazing to create something like this!! I'm definitely leaning toward the barrels for thermal mass. It seems the safest and easiest on the plants.
