Our zero-fuel midwinter greenhouse is unlike any other greenhouse on the planet.

                Our solar greenhouse    Plastic sheeting      Fiberglass/plastic panels
Tomato Weather            Yes                No                      No
Extra Sun                      Yes               No                      No
Low Humidity               Yes                No                        No
Holds 6’ of snow         Yes                 No                      Maybe not
Hurricane-resistant       Yes                No                      Maybe
Affordable                Oh Yes!           Yes                      No

We spent about $7500 on this model's parts (actually we only spent $5000 because Home Depot gave us materials at cost) and that included real cedar clapboard siding and shingles. Hardly anybody can match our building costs, much less match our sustainability over the decades (we use real glass!) or match our production per square foot. We're looking at an engineering revolution here.

We use a solar-powered fan in an air chase to force air through rocks on the bottom of the greenhouse.

The light spreads out inside. We want to diffuse the sunlight yet still land it on the plant racks on the left. Patent number 8,048,199

We aim to raise crops without any fuel at all. Here we have a cucumber sprout in a cutaway milk jug, two blue/white pansies just getting started and a four leaf tomato plant

Someone forgot to water Marcelo at one point (Sorry Marcelo!), but as you can see, Ed did well and so did the tomatoes. A plant sale is approaching.

It's off-grid, fuel-free, long-lasting, affordable and warm! Here the students are raising the reflector wall.

In Rhode Island we need only affordable R-10 insulation in the walls to keep the greenhouse 25 degrees above the average multiday outside temperature. In Rhode Island we simply don't have any weeks where the average temperature, day and night, is 7 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. In Minnesota we would want to double a greenhouse's insulation.

This takes solar to a whole new level:
You can now raise tomatoes all winter in Vermont where the tomatoes never get ripe all summer.
Plastic sheeting only allows subsistence winter growers to keep frost-tolerant lettuce barely alive at 35 degrees these days. Bottom line low-cost growers using our underinsulated greenhouse can choose to raise lush tomato plants all winter except the tomatoes won't ripen half the time in January. Our high-end growers can overinsulate and get 12 months of ripening tomatoes. 10 months or 12 months of tomatoes - your choice!
You can raise local flowers for Valentine's Day.
You can raise spirits, because the greenhouse is sunny enough to help Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers.
You can provide twelve month wheelchair-friendly gardening for seniors as gentle work therapy in a n extremely sunny, warm room. What's not to like?
Students can grow things during the entire school year.
You can help to solar-heat your house and grow veggies at the same time.
You can put concentrated 5x daylight into your bistro. No more fracked natural gas fake fireplace thing; you can pour wonderful natural sunshine onto your fussy customers.
You can perform 12 months of bioremediation on waste water.

Updates on the West Greenwich zero-fuel midwinter greenhouse

5/14/19: The place has the look and feel of a greenhouse now, where only little tiny sprouts just didn't do it for me. "Big E", the best tomato plant, is maybe 18 inches tall now. "Ed" looks like a full basket of flowers now and it's jumping out. The corn seedlings are about 6" tall -- they look like grass blades. Brian was worried about his habanero peppers but they came up in time. I see the start of zucchini blossoms on the big plants, but others are just two-leaf starters. I suppose that if these plants were outdoors, they might be attacked by rabbits, deer, hungry insects and such, but they were all safe inside and they all look pretty good. Exception: cucumber sprouts hate to be transplanted and so they're gone now. I see maybe 250 plants. The school could probably squeeze 1000 sprouts into this greenhouse next February.

4/26/19 The school is aiming for a plant sale around Mother's day. The biggest tomato plant is maybe 6 or 8 inches high. The corn seedlings are shooting upwards. Also I saw carrots, some kinds of lettuce, broccoli, various peppers, zucchini and maybe a cucumber sprout.

Good news bad news department: we have two pots of flowers named Ed and Marcelo. Marcelo started out well ahead of Ed with four blossoms, but either somebody forgot to water Marcelo or else Marcelo was overwatered, so Marcelo died back and is only now coming back. Ed, on the other hand, has ten active blossoms plus four recently closed blossoms, and the foliage has taken over 2/3 of the pot. For the record, Marcelo is a regional manager at Home Depot, and he authorized to give the Greene School $4,000 of greenhouse building materials at cost. Ed is a solar benefactor and a former mathematics teacher.

Also in the good news bad news department, the Jalapeno pepper seeds didn't come up, just lots of mushrooms. However, we have also had two sweet bell pepper plants in the greenhouse getting bigger for a while. Again, it's most likely an overwatering issue, a drainage issue or a failure to sterilize the soil. I'm writing these details down so that future gardeners will know about these issues.

3-2019: Plants in our inexpensive, high-yield, low risk, zero-fuel and off-grid West Greenwich, RI greenhouse are now being kept about 25 degrees above the multiday average outdoor temperature, using thermal mass for long-term temperature stability, with extra sun and with lower humidity too. We have tomato, cucumber and bell pepper sprouts plus two posies. Nobody else on earth can approach what we're accomplishing right now. We're that good!

 

 

 

For info on the package, go to this brochure

ADVANTAGES & OTHER OPTIONS IN DEVELOPMENT

We create solar products for the Frost Belt. We add a surprising number of innovative improvements to make concentrated solar more cost-effective, safer and friendlier.

Solar concentration is always more effective than south-facing solar absorption. It gathers heat more cost-efficiently, Due to sturdy construction, thermal mass & insulation our greenhouse also loses far less heat on cloudy days. It costs little to build solid buildings without plastic, and it saves thousands of dollars that would have been spent on fossil fuel heating costs over the years.

We plan to develop a well-automated version of our greenhouse, an automated daylighting system usable in most buildings, an industrial high-temperature solar heat system and an algae greenhouse to produce algae and biofuel at a competitive price.