Designing and Building a Recycled Greenhouse

Image Gallery 1. Black locust cordwood to connect two parts of wall together.

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Country Skills

Making permanent use of plastic drick bottles, aluminum cans, and elbow grease.

Having lived most of our married lives in urban areas, when we retired in 1988, we wanted to experience a life of greater self-sufficiency. We had been subscribers to MOTHER EARTH NEWS for years and had some pretty good ideas on what we needed to do, starting with buying part of an old mountain farm in western North Carolina. We made sure we had lots of water: a gravity spring, a mountain stream, and a fast-flowing creek. In the old farmhouse, we installed an oil furnace that is gravity fed and doesn't need power from the grid to provide heat. We put in a wood stove to take advantage of the dead trees that had accumulated on our 25 acres over the past decade. A farm that had been neglected for years was a bonus because as vegetarians we wanted to raise food organically, and over time the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that may have been used would have leached out of the soil. Also the wild edibles that grew there naturally had had a chance to grow back. We quickly established an organic raised-bed garden to grow our own food.

From the then-published Homesteader News and a homesteading seminar presented in our home by Sherrie and Norm Lee, we had learned about growing the more hardy plants under plastic in the winter. Having appetites that included tomatoes and peppers, we also built a small lean-to greenhouse on the front of our farmhouse the first fall we lived on the property. The lean-to worked out well, providing solar heat to the house on cold days and using heat from the house on cold nights to provide a reasonably even temperature for growing finicky plants like tomatoes and peppers. We now have some plants that have lived for years. The lean-to location couldn't really be expanded to include what we were growing under plastic, so over the years, we decided to build a solar greenhouse.

PLANNING AND DESIGN

As anyone who has lived on an average fixed retirement income knows, squeezing out money for capital improvements is a challenge. We had already built a twostory pole barn/workshop, so we decided we could build the greenhouse ourselves. We had a budget of $3,000 for a thermal greenhouse with an interior space of 400 square feet. As we drew our plans, it was soon clear that $3,000 was far short of the cost of materials alone. However, we weren't willing to compromise on some key requirements. The greenhouse had to provide essentially all of its own heating and cooling in an area where winters can get down to zero and summers up to 90 plus. Our lifestyle requires that we be away for days at a time, so we needed a design that was passive and could cope with loss of power. We had been active in local environmental projects since moving to our farm, so it occurred to us that many recycled materials can be used in construction, and that from time to time useful building materials are surplused at only part of their retail cost. The key idea for really low-cost construction that would meet our solar greenhouse needs came to us when we reviewed an old MOTHER EARTH News article on cordwood construction. We speculated that if most of the cordwood could be replaced with aluminum cans and plastic drink bottles to make a hollow wall that could be filled with plastic packing, we could have a super-insulated wall of great strength; and by filling the plastic bottles with water, we would have more thermal storage besides.

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