How I grow food year-round despite harsh winters

My high tunnel aquaponic garden was previously featured on C2C back in 2011 shortly after I had built it: [link to www.coasttocoastam.com]

I'm writing to share an update because my project has expanded to such a degree--and in such strange directions--that I think a lot of you will be fascinated by what I'm doing and will hopefully be inspired to create your own systems.

I now not only grow huge amounts of blue tilapia (more than enough to feed my family), I successfully grow lots of edible bananas, figs, and other tropical crops here in Kansas...using almost no electricity or complex technology.

My main goal has been to figure out how to grow healthy 'real' food year-round in a state with harsh winters. My first system, the one featured on C2C, accomplished this via what I call high tunnel aquaponics. Here is a brief pictorial tour showing how that system progressed from 'boring' vegetables into a rainforest burgeoning with bananas and papayas: [link to www.greenfingardens.com] . That system satisfied my goal fairly well and was fairly inexpensive ($2,500 to build myself), but it was more complicated than most folks would want to manage, so I tried to come up with a better system that more people could adopt.

My second year-round food production system is far simpler and even more productive: a well insulated semi-pit tunnel greenhouse that is very cheap ($1,500 to build myself), extremely robust (withstanding winds in the 70-80 mph range on a half-dozen occasions), easy to manage, and, most important, amazingly productive. Even without heating, the lowest the temperature got in there this past winter was 39F...despite three separate polar vortexes that plunged our outdoor air temps to -10F. That allows me to not only grow enough vegetables over the winter to feed a small army (especially stuff like lettuce, spinach, beets, and even sweet potatoes), but to also grow fun tropical and semi-tropical crops like bananas and figs. Sure the bananas stop growing for a few months and die back a bit in the dead of winter, but they come roaring back in the spring because it just doesn't get cold enough to do substantial damage to them. What's more, this makes for a perfect environment for safely raising native fish like catfish year-round. The only power this system really needs is a measly 40 watts to power a small inflation fan that inflates the space between the two layers of greenhouse plastic. This inflation not only creates an extremely effective layer of insulation, it provides rigidity to the plastic, causing wind to slide over it rather than whip and shred it. Here's a pictorial tour that shows the construction and the various crops I've grown in there: [link to www.greenfingardens.com]

These are just simple test systems, but they have been amazingly productive. Hopefully they'll inspire other folks to create their own such systems...or even better systems!

My Dad is Type 2 diabetic, and I started this project primarily as a means to help keep him healthy if he were unable to get his meds for an extended period. It then quickly expanded into a search for a good answer to the question, "How can we keep everyone well-fed regardless of circumstances, whether it's war, pandemics, economic collapse, power grid failure, EMP's, shipping breakdowns, solar flares, peak oil, radical climate change, nuclear meltdowns, etc?" I don't know when or if most of those things will occur, but I sincerely believe that there are simple--and easily scalable--methods for safeguarding ourselves against them, at least from a food-production standpoint. If people lose access to food, society will disintegrate; but if we can all remain well-fed in a calamity, that gives us a good chance at not just surviving it, but thriving in spite of it.

That's why my big-picture goal is to create arrays of decent sized (~10 acre) highly intensive off-grid greenhouse food production facilities, arranged in satellite fashion around communities, that can provide a complete and exceptionally healthy diet that is entirely produced within a few miles of where it is eaten. Virtually anything can be grown in this manner by tailoring the design of each greenhouse to naturally provide the specific environmental needs of whatever is being grown in it. This style of hyperlocalized food production would not only allow folks to have direct and constant access to healthier food (no need for GMO's in our pampered greenhouse environments, for example), we'd get far tastier food, since we'd grow the best tasting varieties rather than the best shipping varieties, and we'd pick them when they're ripe rather than when they'd ship the best.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Hope it can be helpful to some of you.

Got to agree, goats are omnivorous. The only thing they would leave alone would be the metal fixtures and fittings!

LOL

Thank you so much for this info, OP. Not really into it myself yet but know I should be.

I don't know... I saw one eat a beer can once lol

We have a room on the first floor of our 3 floor mountain home for growing herb...ventilation...(pot smell sucks), lighting, sealed grow room...mmmm...herb

This might be the most useful thread in years, thanks. I have land with perfect south exposure but mine is on a hill, about 20 degrees gradient, quite steep. Got any design for hilly areas?