Green-
house
Green-
house
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 compact food-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. Now that Fall has arrived,we’ve added our heating system and will soon be putting in the grow lights in this Greenhouse in preparation 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. You’re looking at Grow Bed #2 where we are growing a lot of squash. We’ll go a little lighter on the squash when this gang matures. What you’re not seeing is Grow Bed #1 which is in front of the camera. It was just planted with tomatoes and melons. Behind Grow Bed #2 are Grow Beds # 3, 4 & 5. Altogether we have just about every veggie you’d ever want to eat in these five Grow Beds. If you want to see some comparison pics and veggie placement descriptions, click over to our “Aquaponics In Class” page. Sometimes you’ll witness us doing our thing, whatever it may be in the greenhouse. Welcome to our world and enjoy.
Sitting directly below this Grow Bed full of tomatoes is one of our 120 gallon Fish Tanks like the one in the picture below. These tanks are made of USDA approved polyethylene resins with UV inhibitors. In them are our Tilapia.
Here’s 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. This coming winter 2009 & 2010, we plan to have just as many veggies growing as we have right now, snow or no snow.
Here are our Live Tilapia Web Cams. The first one sits directly below the above Grow Bed full of tomatoes. This camera sits on the plexiglass/net lid of Fish Tank #1. The second one is under Grow Bed #2. Aren’t they amazing? You can watch them here and on “Our Tilapia” Page. These Cams update every 10 seconds.
USA, The Greenhouse
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.
