By Deborah Bier, Publisher and Editor of The Concord Magazine. Photos by Rich Stevenson and Deborah Bier.
The availability and adoption of local food is a vital part of the relocalization/sustainability movement. Thus was born in 2005 the "100 Mile Diet": that is, only eating food that is grown within 100 miles of your home.
But 100 miles seems so far away when you think of how tens-of-thousands of years of our ancestors generally ate, having so little access to trucks and interstate highways back in old the hunter-gatherer days. Rich, my husband, and I much more like the idea of the "100 Foot Diet": the challenge is how much of our own food can we grow within sight of our back door?
Teaming up with our next door neighbor, we gardened about about 875 square feet this year. After a summer of marvelous vegetables and fruits from our gardens, and of eating plants growing wild on our properties, we took a next step: a greenhouse. A SUBSTANTIAL one: in fact 21 by 48 feet of greenhouse! Coincidentally, it provides almost exactly the same floor space as our small home. (A photo gallery of the building process is on this page.)
Right now, we are just buttoning it up and still at press time have one door to put up where a tarp now hangs temporarily. What will we grow there in this space to which we do not plan to add any heat source save the sun and heat sinks? We have some of the most winter-hardy vegetable varieties growing in beds under floating row cover, and we hope they will do well enough to provide some produce during the winter. We have logs inoculated with shitake mushroom spawn inside the greenhouse, too. We hope they will start producing in a few months. We will be growing a lot of heirloom vegetable seedlings for Spring planting come February, March and April.
We consider this to be an experiment -- and the best way to gain experience, even if we have lots of failures in the process (and hopefully our share of successes, too). Otherwise, we are experimenting, studying and learning how the place works. How can we increase the heat sinks most efficiently? How hot does it get on a sunny day? How cold on a cold night? What's the effect of using fans to mix the air layers? How much protection will the row covers provide? (See an excellent unheated greenhouse experiment in a much colder climate here.) Lots to learn and try, but we believe hands-on to be the best teacher.
Just before building begins.
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Erecting the bows -- it took a gaggle of friends and neighbors to help.
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More bow building -- actually, a significant level of violence was needed to seat them properly.
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The bows are up, and framing our shed beautifully.
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We couldn't get photos of the actual plastic raising because we were so busy. It took another gaggle of friends and neighbors to make that happen. Here we're clipping in the ends of the plastic.
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Plastic up and battened down! Yes, that is a blue canoe inside; don't ask.
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Rich building out the ends -- while the rest of the greenhouse came as a very well-designed package, you're really on your own building the ends.
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Closed up, but still showing many artifacts of the building process. Crops with floating row covers at left. Construction debris at right. A pile of oak chips center, intended to be used as the medium for growing a second variety of edible fungi -- another experiment!
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A night-time beauty shot of the naked bows, taken with a long exposure. Pure magic!
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Art Credits: Page designed by Windfall. Other images courtesy of Clipart.com.
