Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Greg and April" <gregandapril@earthlink.net>]

Ok, I have had this vision of an earth sheltered greenhouse for some time. 
It sits between the house and barn ( that are also earth sheltered ), and 
connected by solar powered ( after all heat gain will be it's highest when 
the sun is out ) vents, ( and perhaps doorways ) to:

a)    Make use of the CO2 given of by the animals.
b)    Help with necessary heating and cooling.

I envision the greenhouse to be large enough to partition off and perhaps 
even grow dwarf fruit trees, and the area with the trees, can be partitioned 
off, and chickens and or other small animals are allowed to roam the area 
eating green mulch, during the summer, and as the food source dwindles, move 
them to a different area of the green house - sort of a indoor pasture 
rotation type of deal.

I envision this greenhouse built on a hill and terraced inside, to take 
advantage of the extra sun, and plants that thrive in the heat ( perhaps 
even tropical ), grow at the top, in the highest levels of the greenhouse. 
While plants that like cool temps, can be grown near the bottom of the 
greenhouse, and an aquaculture, set up providing fish at the bottom.    If 
the water from the aquaculture set up is pumped to near the top of the green 
house and allowed to " cascade " down to the bottom, the water, will do a 
few things:

a)    Provide a measure of cooling during part of the day as a heat sink, 
and warmth during the night as heat source.
b)    Provide a summer heat sink and winter heat source.
c)    Be a source of nutrients to water the plants with.
d)    The solid fish waste can be added to the plants, raising the nutrient 
level of the soil in the green house.

I could go on, for some length, about the possibilities, but, I think that 
everyone here can see where I'm going.

Greg H.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <bennett@frognet.net>
To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" 
<livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2006 11:34
Subject: [Livingontheland] geothermal heating and cooling


>  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.
>
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