Chinese Greenhouse Design for Winter Gardening

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by Martin Wright/Ashden
This woman is able to grow vegetables long into the winter in her passive solar greenhouse located in Ladakh, India, even when the outside temperature falls to negative 13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unlock the sun’s full potential with passive solar greenhouse designs for an energy-efficient Chinese greenhouse design to grow warm-season plants year-round with little to no extra heating.

Typical glass greenhouses require massive inputs of energy to grow crops out of season. That’s because glass, even if it’s triple-glazed, loses much more heat than an insulated wall. But with some thoughtful design, growing fruits and vegetables out of season can be accomplished by using and storing the energy from the sun.

Contrary to its fully glazed counterpart, a passive solar greenhouse is designed to retain as much warmth as possible using thermal mass and insulation. These features make it possible to grow crops year-round with solar energy alone, even when it’s freezing outside, in regions where doing so would otherwise be impossible without large energy inputs. Solar greenhouses are especially successful in China, where many thousands of such structures have been built in recent decades.

The quest to grow warmth-loving crops in temperate regions initially didn’t involve any glass at all. In northwestern Europe, gardeners planted Mediterranean crops close to specially built walls with high thermal mass. These walls created a microclimate that could be 14 to 22 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the surrounding outside temperatures (learn more at Low-Tech Magazine). Later, greenhouses built against these walls further improved yields from solar energy alone. It was only at the very end of the 19th century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated structure where heat is rapidly lost — a far cry from the technology it evolved from.

The oil crisis in the 1970s prompted a renewed interest in the passive solar greenhouse. However, the attention quickly faded when energy prices came down again, and the all-glass greenhouse remained the horticultural workhorse in many parts of the world. The Chinese, on the other hand, have built nearly 2 million acres of passive solar greenhouses during the past three decades.

  • Updated on Nov 30, 2022
  • Originally Published on Apr 13, 2017
Tagged with: Greenhouse Construction, passive solar greenhouse
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