Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

Sheltering livestock in a producing greenhouse will probably be a very bad 
idea. Unless you plan to have them eat your produce. What you call geothermal 
is called earth tubes. You wouldn't worry about condensation and mold unless 
you're piping the air into your house.  It's likely that scheme would use too 
much electric or wouldn't damper your temperature swings enough to be worth 
the expense. If it's too humid for swamp coolers in the summer heat, then 
you're probably better off to time things like tomatoes to set fruit before 
it gets up in the '80s because they set fruit best between 55-75 degrees 
(night and day). Greenhouse or not we have to work with the seasons.   It's 
cheaper, isn't it?

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 3/26/2006 at 1:34 PM bennett@frognet.net wrote:

>> technique can relate to sustainable growing.  In a nutshell:  it's about
>> healthy soil and sustainable growing, and not including commercial self
>> promotions in general.
>>
>  Okay, I'll try this topic out.  If it's "off", then I'm sorry and
>moderators can delete.  How's that? :-)
>  I'm planning to build a greenhouse; well, actually two of them.  One
>will be freestanding 25x48 (have had the hoops for years, so...) the
>other will be more of an attached, enclosed 8x16 porch on our house.
>  We live in zone 6.  Winter temps sometimes get to 20 deg. below zero
>(nighttime) in Jan., but are just as likely to be 50 deg. in the
>daytime.  (Like much of the country, we've had some real strange weather
>the last few years.)  I don't necessarily want WARM greenhouses, but at
>least the one attached to the house, we don't want to freeze.   We'll
>use as much solar thermal gain as we can for both greenhouses.  We will
>also probably use some composting and livestock sheltering for heat in
>the free-standing gh.
>  Summertime here for the past 15 - 20 yrs. has meant at least one month
>of near drought conditions with temps. in the 90s and above.  It's also
>quite humid in the summer.  We're located between hills so don't get as
>much breeze as we'd like.
>  The challenge:  We need to cool the ghs in the summertime, especially
>the one attached to the house.  Traditional electric air-conditioning is
>cost prohibitive.  Our weather is too humid for swamp-coolers.   I'm
>sort of thinking a geothermal system might be do-able and make sense.
>What do you all think?
>  Would just running plastic pipe in a serpintine manner down 3 ft. or so
>underground and blowing hot air in and the (hopefully) coold air out
>work?  Would the pipe need to be perforated to allow any condensate to
>escape?  Would regular squirrel-cage furnace blowers be sufficient to
>blow through such piping?
>  Comments please.
>D.
>