Sometimes you make mistakes. They can be big mistakes, small mistakes, or just mistakes that leave you scratching your head saying why? I finally managed to get some shelves built out of old pallets installed in the off grid winter garden greenhouse. But there’s one problem that I still have to deal with. That problems involves snow. About 5 or 6 feet of snow.
This is a huge step for step us towards our self sufficient goals. A four season, year round greenhouse heated with wood and using solar power to run fans, lights and more. The solar powered greenhouse ventilation and circulation fans with thermostat are key to moving air inside, and removing hot air from the greenhouse if it gets too hot. A winter garden in the north might be considered impossible by some folks. We have several months of the year that we see very little sun. Being able to run just a couple of solar powered LED grow lights off of solar power in our greenhouse may just give us the extra bump we need to keep growing fresh produce year round. We are currently running two 100 watt solar panels to charge two 60 amp hour deep cycle marine batteries in the greenhouse.
Heating a greenhouse is not a simple task. There are many options to explore. We’ve experimented with how to heat a greenhouse in the past. Heating our greenhouse with compost. Thermal mass using large barrels and bins full of water. We’re now moving on to heating our winter greenhouse with wood. In the future we’ll add both compost heat and thermal mass heat back into the mix, but now that we have a woodstove installed in the greenhouse, we can get to work on some early crops, growing food in the winter in a greenhouse. The wood stove is rated for about 10 times the size of our greenhouse.