Taro & Ti Hothouse

Renovation Part I

admin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:33:44 +0000

Every project has a beginning, when plans get put aside and the work starts. And usually, when it comes to renovation projects, that means clearing out the stuff - making way for the demolition and rebuilding. It’s menial, to be certain. But necessary. This project is no different.

Got lotsa junk to move out of the pit.

I have allowed a lot of pots and miscellany to collect outside the enclosure. Well, it kept it out of the house which made my better half much happier. She deserves a clutter free house. It’s not clutter free yet, thanks to me, but it’s better than it was. Unfortunately, that means the clutter migrated to the pit. Hey, I don’t throw pots away - if it can hold dirt, it’s of use to me. But, that means I just have a lot more to move now. Sigh.

Well, I’m giving myself to this weekend to get all that stuff moved out, so work has begun. Get home from work then get back to work. But it’s worth it - every dirty pot I pull out of the sand is a step closer to being finished.

Gotta widen that ramp for the skid-loader.

But, that’s not all. In order to move the loose sand out of there, I need to get the skid loader down there. That means the three foot wide ramp needs to become a six foot wide ramp. I’d taken a pick-axe to the other wall in hopes to straighten it and learned better of it after a couple of swings - that sandstone is hard! But, this bit of carving seemed to go much easier - I’m very relieved. It’s still hard, but still breaks apart with good blows from the axe. With the progress, I expect to finish that by this weekend too - then the next step of the project begins - cleaning the loose pots and detritus out of the greenhouse enclosure itself.

Progress - soon clearing will be done, then disassembly of the enclosure and then I’ll be down there with a skid loader scraping out sand and a with small back-hoe cleaning the pit up and digging a catfish tank at the back end of the pit. Stay tuned…

Greenhouse Renovation Plans

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 04:41:12 +0000

Eventually I’ll have a quarter-acre pit-greenhouse parked in the area that my current pit greenhouse is. It will be deeper and will have tall retaining walls to increase the headroom even more for my coconut trees. But, I’m going to do that right and in order to do that right, I need to have a bit more spending cash than I do now, so my current goals are a bit humbler - clean up my current pit-greenhouse and fully cover it.

This Spring I am renovating it. I will be removing all the plants and pots and whatnot, digging up the ferns that have escaped their pots and whatnot (there is a good 8″ of sand on the floor), then I will remove the cattle-panel hoops and unscrew the walls from each other and disassemble the structure into the wall segments and move them to the side. Then I shall take a skid-loader down there and remove every bit of loose sand from the entire floor of the pit, leaving just a solid sandstone floor. I could easily pour in a bit of grout or Portland and glaze the floor and it’d be just like a thick concrete slab - the hard sandstone goes down perhaps hundreds of feet.

Then I have decided that rather than having a above-ground fish tank, that I may as well sink it since I seem to have no end to good sandstone and it’d make the barrelponics setup much simpler - so I’m bringing in a smaller backhoe. I’ll go to the very end and first make the end wall perfectly vertical. Currently it’s got a little bit of a slope because the backhoe couldn’t dig it straight down from topside. That’ll give me a good 3′ more of length right there, plus make more of a flush fit for the enclosure. And for eight feet of that end, I’ll dig down four or five feet - removing all the sand so I have a nice clean tank and floor.

I’ll shape the other end a bit more square too and will perhaps get another 4′ or so - I hope to end up with a 50′ long pit when I’m done. I guess I could keep digging it but I plan on replacing this smaller pit with a much larger pit in a few years so I’ll settle on not much bigger than it already is for now. I’ll clean the ramp up a bit. Later I’ll lay down some external plywood with strips across it for traction.

Then the old walls go back, extension walls get built to enclose the rest of the pit and the door-end goes back on. Cattle-panels get re-attached, new curved ends get built and that’s that for the enclosure. With a flusher fit, this time around I plan on covering the gap between the sandstone walls and the enclosure wall - often mere millimeters but some irregularities a bit larger - with more external plywood bridging the gap. No more cold air intrusion - which has been the trouble I’ve had with my current temporary setup. Covered gaps means even more earth-mass influence. A very very Good Thing ™.

Then I’ll line my tank, and build the frame-work for my barrelponics containers against the north wall - it’ll go along the wall and then over the tank all the way to the end - don’t think the fish will mind, donchaknow. A few get to drain directly into the tank. The south wall will have my taller trees - nanners and whatnot and they’ll be set up for barrelponics draining and plumbing even if I don’t immediately convert them over to that - at the very least their drain water (I’m completely organic, no nasties in the water) will be recycled in the fish-tank.

Next winter should be very exciting - I may put a chair down there, enjoy the much warmer tropics and frolicking chickens… Heck, I may put a hammock down there and have me a vacation…

Stay tuned - many more step-by-step articles replete with photographs are on the way. This is happening very soon - as soon as I can take the plastic off, shortly after Easter. I can hardly wait.

Earth Sheltered Pit Greenhouse

admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:34:27 +0000

In this area of Texas, I have two problems that I encounter when growing tropical plants. In the winter it freezes - a no-brainer - and in the summer, it gets too hot for many of the tropicals I grow. It’s a pretty unfriendly environment for a plant that is used to an 80-95F range 365 and a quarter days per year. But, the land wasn’t expensive, we have family here, and our well flows good even in the depth of drought, and most importantly, my better half doesn’t want to cart the kids off to some remote Pacific island no matter how much I beg. So, determination and innovation is what I have left - and a blank slate of a property to exercise that on.

First Framing Attempt

My goal is simple - grow tropical plants without going broke doing so. That means keeping the environment above freezing, and below the hundred mark if possible. And doing so without having to depend on expensive heating, be it by fuel - which is ridiculously expensive, or by electricity that, well, is produced by burning fuel currently so is similarly expensive, and without having to buy and install massive swamp-coolers that would only work until our humidity shoots up to where it usually is in the hottest, most miserable part of summer. And that means the solution needs to be inexpensive to build too. No expensive multi-layered glazing, no super-insulated walls or fancy gizmos.

Inside the Pit

Luckily, I’m a huge fan of earth-shelters and underground homes. I may never live in one and may forever be consigned to a stick-frame with a white picket fence, but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming. It just fascinates me that the simplest way to cool down on a hot day is to go a few inches down into the ground - something I’ve seen dogs do. As such, it wasn’t a far stretch for me to consider this for a greenhouse. At one time, I even daydreamed of having the greenhouse totally buried but having light wells. A major inspiration for that idea was Forestiere Underground Gardens as seen on HGTV. I was just enthralled by that show and researched it on the Internet extensively. I also found a Mother Earth News article about another DIY earth-sheltered greenhouse inspiring too. And more so, because he too grows tropicals, I found Russ Finch’s semi-pit earth-sheltered and ground-mass heated greenhouse especially inspiring.

Shed that Donated Siding

My problem was that I had no idea what the structure of my soil was. Our property is not far from a creek, so it was easy to surmise that we were sitting on silt. So I spent an enormous amount of time researching retaining walls and re-enforcing, getting rather elaborate and ultimately fatally impractical. It was time to step back and take a breath. There was going to be an earth sheltered greenhouse here, but I just wasn’t sure what direction to take. Finally, I figured I’d put shovel to soil and see what I came up with.

Beginning the Enclosure Construction

It didn’t take long, tho before the shovel idea seemed less appealing. I got down about a foot then the soil was like concrete. But I had already started - so I called a friend with a back-hoe - it was time to put some money where my ideas was and step in with both feet. I was starting off small and simple - 12′ wide and about 45′ long. I had already decided to use the cattle-panel hoops from my previous greenhouse to cover this thing - going from 9′ wide 6′ tall to 12′ wide and 4.5′ tall covering an 8′ deep pit - soil composition willing.

Three walls up - one to go.

The first couple of bucket-fulls of soil told the story - the reason why I felt like I was digging in concrete after I got a few inches into the subsoil was that it really was, after a fashion. Strip away the shallow subsoil and what I have is sandstone! A rather hard sandstone too. By the time the back-hoe had finished digging, it’s teeth where short, sharp, shiny little nubs, polished to a mirror finish. And what I had was the start of my earth-sheltered dreams - a pit that had walls of solid rock - no re-enforcing needed at all! I was beside myself - it only took an hour to excavate that, and he even carved a little ramp for me to go down into the pit.

The door actually works!

My next quandary was how to cover this thing. It was fairly close to straight, but not perfect. I tried stakes to anchor the cattle-panels, but that didn’t work as the ground wasn’t fully even, making the forming of a perfect hoop impossible. I then figured I’d build a frame to mount it on and support it from inside the pit. That worked well, except, there was a space between the frame and the edge of the pit that I had to contend with.

Already getting crowded.

I spent a winter trying to figure that out and the next Spring I decided to embark on an idea that had been hounding me - build an enclosure inside the pit for at least a temporary earth-sheltered greenhouse. The other option was to scrape the soil around the perimeter, dig a footer trench, pour a few yards of concrete then build a frame on top of that. A very good and ideal idea - but more expensive than I could afford at the time and I needed to relocate my plants pronto.

Installing the Glazing

I had a corrugated-steel clad shed on the property that I was in the process of disassembling, and I had all the lumber that I used in the first framing attempt, so it wasn’t long before I had walls being made. I actually built the thing in a 2-day frenzy of nailing. First the short wall at the back end of the pit, nailed together and clad with the corrugated steel while laying down, then lifted up and leaned against the end of the pit. Then the long walls, each one assembled likewise. They were heavy too - but I managed to get them up. And finally, the door-wall. I was lucky in that our house was in the process of construction when we bought it and had a spare glassed-in screen door. I made use of that for my greenhouse. I braced the top of the greenhouse. I should have braced the bottom too - one wall has moved in a few inches, but it’s stopped where it is so I’m not too worried about it.

12.5 Feet of Headroom - Nice!

I couldn’t afford to enclose the entire pit - not enough lumber, not enough corrugated steel - I was on a near zero budget here. So I only enclosed a little over 17′ of the pit. That required only four cattle-panels to cover. And they went on swimmingly - very easy to do. I did everything solo - no help whatsoever, so it took a bit of creativity to make this work. The ends were a little more awkward. I figured on a couple of pieces of plywood on either end and then I’d cut it to shape to the curve. Well, I never got around cutting it, but it’s worked perfectly the way it is and I figure if I’m going to eventually disassemble this for the new and improved version I’m currently designing, why bother? But the ends really helped stiffen the entire hoop.

All I had left was to glaze it. Since I used cheap poly from the hardware - basically 6mil translucent general purpose poly - that didn’t survive long in the UV rays of the sun, I decided not to cover it right away, but rather concentrated on moving all the tropicals down in the pit. It was now Fall and starting to get cool, but I still pushed it as far as I could, waiting until the last possible moment to put the poly on.

Covered with Snow and Happy

Now, here’s an interesting thing with earth-mass. It radiates heat. It may not seem like it - but with the ground at a constant 65′ish, when it’s cold outside, the walls actually serve as heat sources. I saw the manifestation of that very clearly one morning. A morning that was only supposed to get to the low forties. Instead it dropped to the low 30’s to upper 20’s! And I didn’t have a lick of poly on the greenhouse. I went outside and the grass, house, trees, my pots and junk - it was all covered with ice. My water-hoses were solid with ice. It was cold. And I was terrified. I ran down into the pit and saw… perfectly happy tropical plants that had not a speck of ice on them - lotsa dew tho. Earth-mass at work, folks. Of course, it’s more potent in the Fall, following a hot summer, than the Spring - there is a certain amount of stored energy from the summer playing a part here.

Nevertheless, I promptly glazed the greenhouse. My next challenge was attaching the poly. Did I want to nail it, or wrap it around a 2×4 then nail that, or what? I then remembered the problem I had with my last greenhouse - where the near constant wind eventually found weak spot in the plastic that caused them to rip and caused the rips to keep on ripping. The solution presented itself to me in the spare cattle-panels I now had - why not just lay the other cattle panels right on top of the poly? And it worked. The squares matched up to the ones below the poly, forming tear brakes. Additionally, the wind couldn’t grab huge swaths of the poly, but only little squares. I did have a little rip and it stopped at the edge of the squares as I surmised it would.

Yes, it floods a little when it rains hard.

Now for supplemental heat. I already had a wire out there that I used for my well, and I spliced into that to use for my heater. I didn’t think I’d need it much but figured it would take the edge off. Even tho the enclosure was completely covered now - the walls still were exposed to the outside air - both on the entrance end and in the space between the other walls and the sandstone walls. So - earth-mass or no, it was going to get a little chilly because I was not excluding the winter air effectively. It still performed wildly beyond my expectations. My heater failed at the splice early on - and I never knew it. I had a very few plants show some curious signs, but the vast majority of the plants were so happy that I chalked the few quirks to something else. I figured that the figs go dormant naturally, the boswellia sacra has a highish dormancy temperature range, and that my chocolate trees and coffee trees - all clustered tightly together - were suffering from root-rot problems from the cool, moist soil. However, no heater, and a very cold winter for these parts and the rest of my plants acted like they didn’t even know it was winter!

The flooding never gets deep or stays long tho.

This winter is my second winter in this enclosure. Plans are underway for a new pit greenhouse - much larger, much longer, a little bit deeper and a taller riser giving me more headroom. I have a little more funding and am working at a place where dirt-digging equipment is easy to get ahold of. With my experiences with my current pit greenhouse, this new project is sure to be a blast. My goal is to plant right into the soil of this new pit - soil that I’ll have to make by converting the sandstone into sand then mixing with organic matter and a dash of clay and whatnot. But that, folks, is another article. For my current greenhouse - built when I was at the lowest point of being broke from scavenged components - I am growing plants that would have way outgrown my topside hoophouse, and that required a fraction of the heating that I used up there. All in all, a very economical greenhouse.

To answer a commonly asked question - yes, when it rains hard I get a few inches in the bottom. But that’s it - and the water drains away rapidly. A couple days later, 5″ of standing water becomes a little bit of wet sand. That’s the advantage of having sandstone. The new pit will be completely covered and won’t flood at all, but it’s never been a problem.

First Greenhouse

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:38:11 +0000

I have for years pushed the limits of whatever growing space I was utilizing. For the longest time that meant windows crowded with plants, rows of plant-lights in various locations of my hale - whatever house or apartment I called home, plant shelves brimming with plants and so forth. As a bachelor, that was all well and fine - but as a married man, all that began to change immediately. Gradually, my collections began to coalesce into less conspicuous locations - the plant shelves disappeared, as did the plant-lights haphazardly placed in any open space. With our current house, I now get an east-facing picture window and a south-facing closet of an office. Needless to say, the picture window is almost always crowded - sometimes a point of irritation for my better half, and my office is even now still full of pots of various plants, vines and… dirt.

Folks, it was time for me to grow up and move out - it was time for a greenhouse.

Crowding every available window

I have earnestly desired a greenhouse for years, but had never gotten the gumption to actually build one. But as my plants had spilled out of the house, all growing larger and larger both in size and number, gumption or no, if I wanted them to survive the winter, a greenhouse was the only way. I had at the time recently acquired over 30 varieties of taro, had my bananas, chocolate trees, coffee trees, lemongrass, cashews and a host of other tropicals that simply would not fit inside the house.

I did a lot of cost analysis on different greenhouses and kept coming back to the elegant and super simple live-stock panel design. It was a marvel of simplicity. Livestock panels are heavy-gauge welded wire panels that are 52″ wide and 16′ long. They remain springy even if curved, which is the secret to their sturdiness. When curved with the short ends placed 9′ apart, they form a hoop that is approximately 6′ tall - perfect for all but the tallest of us.

A little more room than needed.

First thing I did was determine approximately how long I wanted the greenhouse to be. Me, I always think big so I made mine twice as long as I really needed - which had its drawbacks when it came to heating the thing. Only go as long as you need - you can always add on later very easily by adding more panels.

Nevertheless, I promptly had the panels delivered - eight of them for my 33′ long greenhouse. They were very inexpensive - less that $20 each at the time. I also got a roll of 20×100′ 6mil basic poly. I could have gone with a greenhouse poly, but at the time I didn’t have that extra $150 or so burning a hole in my pocket, so I chose a much cheaper but much shorter-lived general translucent poly from the hardware store. To connect the panels I chose zip-ties. They’re a good one-season solution - but if you plan on making this permanent, get some bailing wire instead. I never got around to framing the ends of this particular greenhouse - I considered it as temporary so I didn’t bother with it.

I did put in more plants tho…

I marked out where the panels would go. For my temporary greenhouse, I was staking them directly in the ground. Sturdy tent-stakes work well - use a lot of them. Then I took a panel and curved it into place. They are rather stiff - having a helping hand would have helped enormously. But, kids were too young and wife had a real job. Anyway - I step back and admire my first hoop - only to realize that the short wires are on the outside. With them thus, after I put the poly on, their ends would rub holes in the poly. So… I de-hooped it and re-hooped it with the long wires on the outside.

Cheap and beautiful

I put the rest of them up, next to each other. Unconnected, they’re a bit wobbly, but they maintain their hoop very well. Out came the zipties. I chose to zip them together where the long and short wires were welded, matching each panel up together. That way there’d be less shifting. It didn’t take long to get them all zipped up. I’d have taken pictures of the construction process but at the time I was in a panic-manic because a cold-front was coming thru and the greenhouse had to be done then and there before I left for work. Nevertheless - the simplicity of construction can’t be overstated.

Pipe-insulation protecting ends.

Once I had them all ziptied together, I decided to put pipe-insulation on each end to keep the poly from rubbing on the wire ends. For a greenhouse this length, there is a fair amount of shifting as the poly warms up in the day and chills down at night - it got tight as a drum on really frigid days - so protecting the poly on points where it’ll rub is important.

As to its effectiveness - the minute I got the poly draped over the hoop - something I did completely solo, working with the wind, inside it got steamy hot almost immediately. That was comforting. In retrospect, though, I should have built ends for the greenhouse - in this case I draped the poly instead and anchored it on the ground. It made my job harder in opening the poly to let air flow thru, then closing it every night - a pair of easily made vents would have been much easier.

Now, connecting the poly to the greenhouse. Since mine was temporary and directly staked to the ground, I didn’t have a wooden footer to attach it to. But I had a stack of pallets and a stack of old hay bales. In a time crunch, I made use of what I had - laying the pallets on the ends of the poly to anchor them tight, and weighing them down with hay bales. It actually worked pretty well. I used hay-bales to anchor the draped ends too. It wasn’t perfect - but it did the job I intended for it to do.

A few plants tucked in

Alternatively - were I to build this thing today, I would use a footer frame. But, this may come as a surprise - I would be less concerned with stapling the plastic to the frame. You see, I had a little problem that Spring - the shrinking and expanding and wind-flapping had caused rips. By the time Spring came around, the poly was more brittle from solar exposure and in time I had duct-tape holding it all together. It made it tho - it didn’t start ripping until it was almost time for me to take it off. But, it was still a bit disconcerting - if it rips at night and a cold front comes thru things could get ugly. My current solution is simple - limit the length of tears by placing another set of cattle-panels on the outside! I hoop those over the poly-covered hoops and simply anchored it to the wooden frame by nails - the tension of the springiness keeps it in place and… no flapping! Tears that form stick to one little square rather than migrating. That will be covered in another article tho - however I feel that solution may help some reading this article…

I put down some pallets on the inside of this hoop-house and started moving plants in. None-too-soon too - the cold-front was already making things brisk. I folded up the plastic at the ends and that was that - off to work. The next day I went out and opened the ends to keep it from over-heating - everything survived a freezing night with no heat at all.

Wet from Greenhouse Rain

Since I had made the greenhouse so long, my heating plan shifted from total ambient warmth to localized warmth - I set the simple hardware heaters - two of them - to cover the collection of plants and create a little heat-bubble around them, even tho the rest of the greenhouse would get rather chilly. That worked pretty well too. Protect your heaters from greenhouse-rain tho. The humidity will condense on the poly and it will drip light rain. I found it particularly amusing walking in there with dry hair and leaving pretty wet. Your plants may suffer some cold-drip leaf damage (cold water drops dripping on leaves), but it’s really minor. Working out there in the rain can be noisy too - but it was pretty neat. I put a little florescent light out there so I could go out there and pot stuff up after work.

Greenhouses grow on you if you don’t over-stress your wallet and time. Mine was cheap, easy to build, easy to maintain and fun to work in. My current pit-greenhouse re-used some of the materials that comprised this greenhouse - the hoops are still hoops. But I may build a few more topside greenhouses to cover some taro beds to extend their season a bit here. If I were to try to do this with conventional greenhouses, it would be impossible just from a cost perspective.

If you decide to do this method, please let me know how it works for you and send me pictures. This kind of DIY greenhouse always inspires creativity and I’ve seen some pretty neat solutions out there.

Welcome to the Hothouse!

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:35:33 +0000

Welcome to Taroandti.com. I’ll document my greenhouse projects here. I have a pit-greenhouse that I keep all of my tender tropicals in, and have topside greenhouse projects to house the not-so-tender tropicals. It’s been an adventure and this site gives me the motivation to re-organize my greenhouse images for your viewing pleasure.