Farm Tour Series: The Walipini; Use, Design, .and Construction

well we have a lot of visitors here at redgate farm and when people drive down the driveway inevitably they get to the house and they ask what in the world is that so i answer it's a walapini that doesn't help much [Music] wow [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] so why don't we have a greenhouse that loses heat out of more sides than it actually gains heat it's not a very good idea it's not very efficient so a wallopini essentially opens up the side that gains the sunlight but closes off and heavily insulates or burns up with earth the side that does not have any sunlight follow us now as we go through the design of the wallopini so the overall idea is wherever i'm gathering solar energy i want that to be a large surface where i'm not gathering solar energy i want it to either be a small surface so i don't lose heat or i want it to be underground or heavily insulated so let's take a look at this we're in the northern hemisphere so this is the south facing roof right here i'm gaining a tremendous amount of solar energy through there in the winter and some in the center to get here to my grow bed however my north side is buried underground so is the bottom and so is the front wall because i don't want to lose heat here so this these angles all depend on what latitude you are and of course whether you're in the north or the south in the northern hemisphere the sun is to the south of us so being south facing in the winter time i the sun is about 26.6 degrees in the winter solstice which is around december 21st at that point i get i can get max penetration through the wall if i set this perpendicular to that but what i do is i set that perpendicular on january 15th because that's my coldest month so if i look at my latitude and i look at the azimuth of the sun on january 15th i'm going to put this front wall or front roof perpendicular or 90 degrees to the sun angle and for me that's 30 degrees so the sun is 30 degrees off of the horizon so my front wall is 60 degrees in the summertime the sun goes up and where i am that's at 76.6 degrees now notice here when the sun comes through in the winter time it goes back and it hits these barrels and it heats them up that heat is gathered and then dissipated at night when the sun is down however in the summertime as the sun comes up i don't want it to hit the barrels so you'll notice here it's hard to see but that steel roof up here stops right here and there's small bit of glazing up here that bit of glazing is just enough to allow that summer sun to get down and hit my grow bed but not enough for it to hit the barrels because i don't want the sun to hit the barrels in the summertime i want them to be nice and cool so as you can see these angles are all dependent on where you are where you live and you can gather that data off the internet it's pretty easy to get now let's look at this back roof here this is all water collection all the rain that comes down goes into the gutter through a pipe and fills up the 55 gallon barrels there are 30 of them in the back that's about 1 650 gallons of water that i can contain in the back that's a lot of thermal mass it's also a lot of water for the grow bed and we'll show you that in a second too the front wall here why do i have such a deep pit well realize that even though this is collecting my solar energy it is also allowing cold to basically come through the front wall into the wallopini in the winter time i want that cold air to run down the front wall fall deep into the earth because this earth doesn't change temperature stays about 55 degrees that's called a cold sink the cold air falls to the bottom and is heated by the earth and then slowly comes back up here and meets with the warm air and the radiation from the barrels in order to give me a nice stable temperature in the winter time one note here you won't be able to see this outside but there is a drain tile it comes through here and empties out in the back in the north slope that's very important because as water comes down in here it can actually on heavy rains fill up down there and it drains nicely but this also allows air to flow in in the winter time and as that cold air from outside comes from way down in the woods goes through about 65 feet of earth before it comes into the bottom that earth heats up that air so that i can get good air flow back into the wallopini but it's not bitter cold air all right let's back up and take a look at the actual wallopini all right let's go from pictures to practicality when we built the walapini the first thing we had to do was dig a 60-foot trench and luckily at the same time we were building a pond in the pasture and my excavator had his big back go out here so i said can you dig me a big trench along the driveway and he thought it was a little nuts but within a couple hours he did it the front was eight feet below grade then there was a shelf that was four feet below and i had him pile all the dirt in the back side once i had that hole i got on the lumber mill and i milled a whole bunch of big pillars i have pillars 16 pillars on the front wall 16 pillars on the back wall i had a little help from one of our woofers worldwide opportunity for organic farmers who was here from france and she was an engineer so she helped me design the roof structure that would exactly meet up with the sun angles that we talked about earlier so once we designed that i built a template in the barn and i built 16 of those trusses to go along the top once those were in place we got the twin walled polycarbonate we put that in place got the tin on the top the gutters put all the barrels inside and it all came together i won't say there weren't some issues but it eventually came together there's all sorts of designs out there we kind of tried to stick with one because we just couldn't make decisions on what we exactly wanted one thing we thought about was the grow bed itself you can you can make a big grow bed and you can make walkways and stuff to get back to other things but we thought you know what if we do 36 to 48 inches of growth space then we can stand there in the cold sink and we can do everything without ladders without climbing up without walkways we could do everything from a nice comfortable area right down there in the walkway so that's why we decided this now that's where the front wall and the back wall this is all about angles i want the sun to come in and hit this grow bed and make it all the way back there in the winter i want it to capture not only the grow bed but the entire tank in the summer i want it to come down and hit the grow bed but not the tank so all these dimensions for the front wall the grow bed how high it is and how wide it is it's all based on sun angles and how you can get solar radiation on on this bed here so we go back to the tanks here these are the 55 gallon drum tanks that we have and we were lucky there was a company in town that we got these for five dollars a piece we connected them on the bottom with pvc piping and then three areas in the wallopini we have a pipe that comes out here with a valve and this is an inline filter because we have drip lines here that feed water to the grow bed that's very nice because that inline filter gets out all any grit or something that comes out of the gutter and cleans it before it gets to the drip line any of you that use drip lines know you have to have a filter otherwise they clog all the time so i can control there are three sections of this bed i can do section one section two section three do all three of them do two of them whatever i can control it with valves here on the inlet pipes or on the actual soaker hoses themselves but they all go through a filter that's kind of key because a lot of times we will plant in sections if you notice before i was standing down in section one it was planted about a month ago section two here was just planted so we watered that bed separately now these tanks should be all level so that as the water comes into the tanks on the end it will go through this pipe and level throughout it's very important to keep these clean and not always easy to do so so let's hop down from here and take a look at some other aspects so let's talk about the floor a little bit we need airflow we need air coming in and transferring out of the wallopini because you need to have carbon dioxide you can't just close it in make it airtight that will stabilize the temperature but it will not stabilize your carbon dioxide levels so how does air get into the wallopini well there's a couple ways first of all that drain tile that is underneath the floor i'm going to pick this up in a second and show you that secondly behind me there is a large 18-inch culvert that goes out up those steps and back into the woods it brings a large amount of airflow again through the earth underground so that the earth can actually heat it up before it comes in the floor is slatted so that wall air can come off that front wall fall down hit the earth and then come back up now these slats are kind of rough looking because when i milled the walnut trees out the pasture when my friend was building the pond i took the branches which normally are not good for lumber and i said you know what i can make a bunch of short little slats and build a floor out of those branches normally you wouldn't mill that type of lumber you'd use it for firewood but i knew these were all going to be short and i knew i just needed durability and resistance to rot and that's what you get with walnut now some people a little angry that i built the floor out of walnut but hey that's what's available so let's pick this up and show you i've got each of these sections such that i can pick them up and get under the floor and although it's not terribly easy we can now see this drain tile here i allow water to come in the front wall i don't want to block it off because hydr uh hydrostatic pressure is extremely powerful and it can cause it to cave in so i allow it to flow in build up down here this brings air in and it brings water out of the wallopini what we intend to do in the future is to actually fill this with sawdust and put some spores down there and allow mushrooms to grow and i'm really excited about that new project and i'm gathering a lot of sawdust from the lumber bill to get that started so let's take a look at the top side now so the roof is important because especially in the winter you can lose a lot of heat out of this roof and i've got these insulating panels back here but you can see that they're divided there's an insulating panel back here that's permanently affixed and then there's an insulating panel up here that actually comes out you turn these little wooden pegs you drop these out and i drop those out in the summer because that's where my sun comes in in the summer i have a 76.6 degree azimuth in the sky and that sun actually comes through the top and comes right down there on the grow bed but in the winter the sun is way too low in fact from fall around october time all the way to march the sun is too low to ever come in through the top so there's no reason to have that exposed i put these insulating panels in and block it off it's also important here what also is blocked off are the vents up front so when we go outside we're going to show you the backside and we're going to show you the vents out front that allow that hot air in the summer to escape so we're on the front side or the south side and this is where all my solar radiation comes in but i had to vent the top so what i did is i designed these vents on the front side that are on hinges and during the summer i can pin these up and allow the highest part of the roof to vent the hot air out and i can screen those to keep things out if i need to but you can see the front side of the thermal insulating panels there sticking out closes right over the top of it and keeps all that heat in during the winter time well this front wall is eight millimeter twin walled polycarbonate we went with twin wall it's a little more expensive but it's actually got an r value it's only r2 but you'd be surprised how much cold can get through this if you just use plastic now if you do use plastic that's fine you need to pull it tight and it's probably best to have two layers so depending on how much you want to spend you also look at things like transmissivity how much solar energy is actually getting through that surface and also you look at strength too because you're going to get a snow load now with a 60 degree front wall not a lot of snow load there but if you're looking at the top side that's only 30 degrees and so you're going to get some snow load up there but we've been really happy with this it's very durable we've got some really high winds here and it just it doesn't flex or beat or anything and we haven't lost a panel and i think we've been out here for five years so i'm really happy with this one thing that we kind of had to do a repair on here was this this soil in the front wall sunk down a little bit but i realized in hindsight it would be better to actually pour a wall there it's not too much more costly but it's significantly stronger and it would keep that front wall protected when it sank down and exposed some of the tin on the wall and of course cold will go right through that tin so we've had this stuff straw on this front side to give some insulation on the front side so we're on the north side now so the north wall is completely covered with the berm that's in the back the north facing route is covered with tin because i'm not going to get sun through that but at the very top in the summertime the sun is high enough that i do get some sun through there i've got some polycarbonate up there but you'll also make note of the fact that sunlight travels most efficiently through a surface at 90 degrees so that front wall at 60 degrees takes max penetration on january 15th well in the summer when that sun comes through the top it does not hit at 90 degrees it hits it somewhat of an angle and deflects some of it keeping some of the heat out of there i get plenty of solar energy to the plants in the summer but i don't want that intense heat so even though that lets some in it also reflects quite a bit off so these angles again are critical and you really want to think about that when you do your walloping so for those of you who watched our video capturing the rain you've seen this before but let's go over it again on the north wall you've got the water running down and into the gutters but i have a leaf guard here to try to get all sticks and leaves and anything we can out once it comes into the six inch gutter it goes down to the inlet pipe that also has a screen on it before it enters inside the wallopini once inside the wallopini it falls into the tank which has a screen on the top and then equalizes through the pvc on the bottom of the tanks then the lines that go out to the drip line as i showed before they have inline filters a lot of filtration to get that sediment out before it actually gets to the drip lines in addition to the soaker hose we have two spigots in the wallopini that are directly from the tanks underground and out the front wall we use those specifically for filling watering cans to water individual plants so one entrance is actually a ramp and the other one is stairs we specifically wanted to ramp because we do bring wheelbarrows down here and sometimes small equipment down here so ramp on one end stairs on the other end so pest control in the wallopini is just like any other greenhouse aphids are always a nightmare for us cabbage looper get in here too but we sometimes use sacrifice plants plants that attract aphids and and those cabbage loopers and will give up those plants but it'll also tell us that they're there so we can take action against them a couple things we do is here we've got i think we've got some aphids here on the bottom of this guy and you can see that it's eaten up there but over here we've got a little if danielle can pan over we put little cups in the soil and we put beer in them and as you can see the worms love the beer worms pill bugs cabbage loopers they like the beer and they go in the beer they get drunk and they drown so that's some way to control pests in the walapini we also release ladybugs every once in a while and the thumper here or this is a buzzer actually this is for voles it's solar powered and it buzzes every once in a while to send sound through the ground that they don't like so it keeps the voles out of here because you can have quite a few of them dig under the wall over there and get in we could have put down screening below the grow bed but we decided not to do that and this seems to be pretty effective now the way we designed this we were hoping that it wouldn't freeze in the winter and it took about three years before we got a freeze free wall of preening we had to do a couple of modifications and seal up a few areas up in the front wall and we kind of have to do that every year because things shift around but because it's freeze free it's especially useful in the february march time frame where we can start all our seedlings in here and it they harden better when they transition from here to the outside as opposed to going from grow lights in the basement outside and the way we do that is we have boards up here that we lay along the rafters and we put all our seed trays up here and do all our starts right up here while we still have growth on the grow bed now some of the growth on the grow bed is taken out in the spring to make room for seedlings but when you come in here in the springtime it's pretty much this top layer and all of the grow bed that doesn't have plants on it have seedlings getting ready to head back outside for spring so some of the benefits of the wall of peony really didn't come to fruition until we did a little research we planted tomatoes in here and harvested tomatoes on christmas day a couple years ago we had some hot season plants to see how long they would go we had some cold season plants which really thrived throughout the winter we've actually put some tropical plants in here at one time we had banana plants one on each end and these were dwarf bananas and i don't know what happened but apparently they like the walipina because these banana plants grew so tall and vigorously they pushed my sealing panels out so so we got rid of the banana plants but a friend of ours gave us this aloe plant and i think he was kind of daring us to put it in here because he said yeah does it really not freeze in the winter well that was three years ago and as you can see this aloe plant is thriving and it's got a bunch of pups behind it so yes it is frost-free year-round and this aloe plant absolutely loves it the only problem i have with this is that i have to keep these drip lines away from it because aloe does not like a lot of water it likes desert so i got to be careful when i hand water around it too this is a pomegranate we've already picked our pomegranate for this season we've got a little orange tree lemon tree lime tree and we're planning on using this failure system here to try to bring these plants out along this rafter here and out along this one so that it doesn't block too much on the grow bed so i'll let them grow up there and not block the grow bed too much we'll see how that works but these are all tropical plants and obviously all of them would die in the winter if it froze in here so that's maybe just a little bit of arrogance for us to put tropical plants into a walipini so over the years we've tried really hard through experimentation to figure out exactly how to get the best use out of the wallopini and what we realized was there are some times of the years there's nothing in here that's mostly mid-summer i've got plenty of food coming out from there i don't need to be spending time in here and i'm not going to get a whole lot out of here anyway but the critical time is really full you're pulling a lot of stuff out of the garden you're trying to dehydrate you're trying to can you're trying to freeze you're trying to process and you really don't want to be harvesting on here because you have plenty of food out there but if you plant in here like that first bed was planted in august but that foods all are going to be spent probably in december time frame so you push that back a little and september october seems to be the ideal time now some of this was planted in october and it may be a little bit late but realize january march time frame our starts are coming back in here so we want the beds to be kind of clearing out at that time too so it's all a timing thing it's not only when you plant but it's what you plant and that's something that we've learned over the years too and danielle's done a good job of figuring that out so we look down here and we've got some cabbage that's going to pop up here in a couple months that'll be really good arugula that's going to come up in just a couple of weeks so we can start throwing that into some salads radishes i like radishes beets turnips those root crops i like to ferment those so i can plant those any time of the year and then get them in jars with the brine and ferment them and uh it you know a lot of the fermenting takes the the sting out of a radish but that crisp crunch and that pickle flavor ah it's unbeatable love it carrots are great because carrots can grow at all times of the year but they don't really like hot weather they really like cold weather so when you plant them in the walapini and they grow through that cold season uh february time frame you're picking carrots and they are as sweet as a sucker i just absolutely love the carrots that are grown in the walapini so now uh even our sacrifice plant you know we put these sacrifice plants like i said you know we get some aphids on here we say hey we got an aphid infestation but isn't it interesting that even our sacrifice plant produces a beautiful turnip and turnip greens so oh that is beautiful isn't it and finally we're ending up down here we've got some lettuces more uh carrots we've got some chard behind but i'm gonna sneak in here see if we got some bush beans to pick here oh yeah we got a couple of them i love these bush beans they also get really sweet when when growing in the cold here but uh like we say on redgate farm we do things a different way bon appetit some people ask how i got this crazy idea to do a wallopini or how i even heard about it well back when i was a professor at the air force academy one of my engineering students actually brought it to me as an idea and i was intrigued i began to research and realize there's very little resources online or in books about how to build it or or what angles to use or anything so a lot of it was just hey let's dig a hole and see if we can figure it out well over the last five years we've learned a lot we didn't do it exactly the way it should have been done maybe but i would do a lot of changes but i would definitely i in the future i'm going to build another one and i'm going to incorporate some of the things that i've learned and i would like to help other people build them too this is a very exciting adventure for us and and we're really excited about this well that include concludes our farm tour series here at red gate farm i hope you've enjoyed the videos and coming up next we are now danielle is going back to her roots and working with wild mustangs again like she did years ago through the tip program so stay tuned i think you'll enjoy that you

Channel: A Different Way

Views: 253,859

Rating: 4.9534578 out of 5

Keywords: walipini, greenhouse, pit, underground, growbed, compost, how to, diy, passive, solar, geothermal, off grid

Id: Qvk7Sszh6fg

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020