The Greenhouse is a self-contained ECO SYSTEM--a highly controlled environment where the temperature is kept around 75 degrees F. If you click over to our “About” page you’ll see the leveled dirt where this Greenhouse now sits. We’ll be posting the entire portfolio of how this construction project progressed from start to finish on our up-coming Photos page. You’ll see the pouring of the slab, building the block wall extension, assembly of the Greenhouse, installing the electricity, plumbing and evaporative cooling systems and setting up our Food Forever™ Growing Systems with add-ons you can purchase from our Products page like grow lights, automatic fish feeders, water chillers for summer and heaters for winter.
This front view gives you a concept of the width and length of our Greenhouse. It only comes 8.5 feet wide, but you can add as many four-foot sections as you please. Each divider is two feet. We started with a sixteen foot plan but expanded it to twenty-eight feet once we realized we needed a one to one ratio of gallons of water in the Grow Beds to gallons of water in the Tanks.
Our Rion Greenhouse is made up of six sides not including the floor, front and back. It rises four feet before making an inward turn of two feet and another inward turn to make the roof peak. This configuration repeats on the other side. It’s not a tall structure so we placed ours on a three foot riser to give us lots of growing space out of the Grow Beds and plenty of head room. This is a water environment so we slightly sloped our floor down in front where we have putt a drain to handle any water overflow. The interior has our compact units set up down the middle.
Here it is, our Live Greenhouse Webcam. Check in any time to see how it’s all going. Grow Bed #2, visible in the top of the picture, where you see our peppers growing. Grow Bed #1, visible in the bottom of the picture, you see five varieties of lettuce growing. What you’re not seeing are Grow Beds #3-5 which are behind #1 & #2. The clear barrel with the lid is our Automatic Fish Feeder. Sometimes you’ll witness us in the greenhouse. Welcome to our world and enjoy.
Sitting directly below this Grow Bed soon to be full of lettuce gone wild is one of our 120 gallon Fish Tanks like the one in the picture below. The Grow Bed behind the lettuce bed is full of tomatoes, melons, peppers, cucumbers and eggplant. These tanks are made of USDA approved polyethylene resins with UV inhibitors. In them are our Tilapia.
Below is a picture you’re not going to believe. Within weeks of our completing the construction of our Greenhouse (before installing our systems, electricity etc.) it snowed here in the high desert of California. We now have just as many veggies growing in the winter as we do the rest of the year, snow or no snow.
In this picture, we were getting ready to set up our first system in our newly constructed Greenhouse. Here you see the 120 gallon Fish Tank sitting in the foreground and part of a Grow Bed stand leaning up against the brick riser we built to make the Green house taller.
Build your own Greenhouse! Just follow these Easy Plans.
Lots of Designs and Sizes
to choose from. There’s a perfect Greenhouse for your
Food Forever™
Growing System
Our GREENHOUSE
and GROWROOM
in all of their Continually
Growing Glory!
Below, see our Live Greenhouse Webcam, our Live Growroom Webcam and our Live Tilapia Webcam
Here it is, our Live Growroom Webcam, below (this is our latest project and is going to become a new webpage in the near future). We’ll also be making a new YouTube Video soon based on this Growroom, which we are really excited about as it will be the first time we’ve grown food aquaponically without sunshine. We’ll announce and post our new YouTube Video here, on our WordPress Blog, on the American Preppers Network, on our Facebook Page and we’ll also put it under “Gardening” on the Natural News Video pages. So keep your eyes open for it because it’s going to be really informative.
In the meantime, check in any time to see this Live Webcam. It’ll show you how it’s all going. This room is growing leafy greens only and is serving as a proof of concept for our commercial system over at Aquaponics Earth. We’re demonstrating how quickly and efficiently you can grow things like lettuce, basil, cilantro, spinach, kale and other leafy greens under grow lights.
We are using LED over all of the grow four beds, and depending on how well these lights produce growth in the plants, we will be offering them for purchase on this web site.
Here is another Live Tilapia Web Cam showing our big (2 lb.) fish that are in our 320 Gallon Tank in this Growroom. This is the tank you can see between Grow Beds #3 and #4 in our Growroom above. Now just because we have little fish in the smaller 120 Gallon Tank and big fish in the larger 320 Gallon tank doesn’t mean little fish won’t grow to be big fish in the smaller tanks. We recently moved these big guys out of the 120 Gallon Greenhouse tanks where they were raised from fingerling size. We have also discovered we have a breeder in this tank (there was a time when we thought we had all male tilapia). That’s why we added the aquarium for growing out fry. The large tilapia don’t eat the fry (small ones will) as the larger ones become less protein dependent and more interested in the pellets they’ve been trained on. We decided to move the fry into a separate aquarium because they are very protein dependent. The Fast Growth Tilapia Fish Food we are feeding them is a powder (rather than a pellet); and this powdery food started clouding our big tank. This camera is mounted on the wall and looking down into the tank. The white round cylinders are their fish condos. You can also clearly see our method for heating the water, a half-inch stainless steel pipe twice encircling the fish tank on its inside perimeter, which is being warmed by the water heater.
You’re looking at our FFGS-40 Food Forever Growing System with its 320 gallon fish tank peeking out between Grow Bed #3 and Grow Bed #4. Sitting just below and in front of Grow Bed # 1 (foreground) is a second small tank, the FT-120. This 120 Gallon Round Fish Tank can be purchased separately and added to any of our larger systems (FFGS-20, 20-20, 40, 50, 80 or 100). We plan to use this extra tank to grow out fingerlings. We are currently growing out about 65 two to four inch tilapia fingerlings in this tank.
At bottom right, is one of our Automatic Fish Feeders sitting on the edge of the 120 gallon brooding tank, held in place by our custom made mounting bracket. We offer this bracket for free when you order a system.
We also have a seed starting environment to go with our Seed Starting Kits. It’s off to the right in the corner of the room you can’t see (pictures coming in the near future). This seed starting environment is designed into a four-tiered shelving unit with three more Fluorescent Lights. We’ve added another grow out tank, which is a 30 gallon aquarium, for growing out our fry (newly hatched tilapia). The Water Heater you can see between Grow Bed #3 and Grow Bed #4 is what we’re using to heat both the water and the room.
Remember, the only metal allowed in an aquaponics system is stainless steel. We have a half-inch stainless steel tubing twice encircling the fish tank on its inside perimeter (as can be seen below), and we are circulating the hot water from the water heater through it as needed.
To the right of the visible door and up is our small swamp cooler (out of frame), which we use during the hot season here in the high desert. It is vented at the opposite end of the Growhouse. This single cooler is much smaller than the two larger coolers we’re currently using to cool our Greenhouse of the same size.
Everything in Bold Lettering is available on this website. Clicking on them takes you to the appropriate page to learn more about these items.
