Growing tropical fruit in the freezing mountains of Colorado without heating

[Music] hey friends today we're checking out a 4 season Greenhouse in the high mountains of Colorado Jesse's been growing tropical fruits for over 20 years he's got coffee bananas avocados he's going to give us a tour of how he grows everything how he Heats his main house just with this greenhouse back here and how easy they are to build let's go we just went away for a week and the banan sort of got fried but some years we get a couple Bunches of bananas and that's sort of cool everything got sort of fried while we were gone I see I haven't really been in here these are figs boy it must have just got dry in here or something anyway usually they're really green and verdant looking these are Basils these are olive trees have you gotten olives off of them haven't got gotten olives yet they say it takes 10 years like in Italy or Greece before you get olives off an olive tree and it's been about 12 okay we haven't gotten any yet this is a pineapple plant I think there's a couple with pineapples on them and pineapples they just keep reg growing right you just leave them there you take a pineapple and you cut the head off it you know and plant that and then it grows into one of these there's some lettuce and some Tomatoes we can get cherry tomatoes year round coffee these are coffee plants I don't know I I might take them out but I have a hard time taking something out once I put it in let's see avocado tree another olive tree these are chards Swiss chard that are about 20 years old they just don't die Tomatoes don't either that's how big GA trunk gets after a while so you just PL chards and it keeps growing yeah and we've picked the coffee beans and I made coffee one time but it was a lot of trouble wasn't worth the squeeze if you really needed some coffee it would be and these are all different kinds of citrus trees but they they sort of blend together and they all make these oranges that are about the size of a lime and they taste like a lime they're like an orange lime they call them sour oranges in Mexico they're hard to see but there's a little lime that I see right there until they get bigger and turn colors and all of a sudden you realize oh we got a lot of them we get about five buels of citrus fruit every year just even in this little section right here yeah you could grow a lot of food out here but we don't really need it we get it in the garden I think everybody that lives in Colorado and Utah and New Mexico should have a solar Greenhouse they work so well you could grow most of your food right in here and you don't have a heating bill tell you where it really saves you some money if you walk out here in January and and you're around all this green stuff every day you don't feel like you have to fly to [Laughter] Mexico during my brief summer visit to the homestead Jess kept mentioning how remarkable the transformation in the winter was I wanted to see personally what his Greenhouse looked like in the middle of winter so just to give us a second tour just to see how his Greenhouse was doing it was quite remarkable okay it's 44° out it's a really warm January day here but in the greenhouse I just looked 117 imagine they get this in Arizona and that outside uh I pruned everything back a lot recently but you can see some oranges and limes up there I really like sorl a lot it makes the best pesto in my opinion we got some lettuce here for salads that's an avocado tree just heavily pruned I pruned the coffee bushes back really really big time because they were blocking those those collectors that's a chard a Swiss chard it's about 12 years old so they get long stems and the collect ctors I found laying around and I have them hooked up and when the sun's out like this it hits a solar panel out there and runs a little motor and runs the water it goes through these collectors and then through our floor and it gives us three or four de inside the house inside the house which is yeah that's not nothing we've been getting some Garden Tomatoes some fresh tomatoes this one's starting to turn red a little bit we got a red one inside and that's not bad for January second in the middle of Colorado yeah you can see the mountains up ahead oh there's a little pineapple I guess that's the only one that's growing right now there's some figs up there they're sort of hard to get to so all these barrels are full of water and and we use them to water these things during the winter the barrels go all the way down the greenhouse and they last about all year and then this gravel on the floor is about 5 in thick and it's over styrofoam like twice and 20 years I've put out electric heaters cuz I didn't want to freeze everything and some things are a lot more susceptible to freezing like the bananas if it gets to like mid-30s the leaves start to turn yellow and die and so it heats up during the day and here it's like 117 now and it cools down to like the 40s at night and during the day we open the windows and doors to the house just this greenhouse seats the whole house if you have like four or 5 hours of Sun that that'll do you another thing that's crucial in a passive solar house is you have to have window shades you lose 90% of your heat through the windows so even if the walls are super insulated it doesn't do any good so the first year we were here we didn't have them the first winter it was really cold then we built the greenhous and got shades for the windows just those just to stop the heat from radiating right out this house is 3,400 Square ft every year but one I've only burned a quart of wood and that's all so that's like a fire every five days or something it works really good and is it pretty expensive to build something like this no I don't think so I think all this glazing is quadruple wall polycarbonate and all the glazing was 5,000 bucks and a little framing Lumber and painting them and not counting my labor I probably got the most 10,000 in it and it's heated our house for 20 years so you got your return yeah yeah just done [Music] that these are all the blackberries we get a year supply of blackberries and Beyond there's raspberries they're pretty much done these are uh Goji berries I'm not a big fan of Goji me neither and then you you got a ton of Golden Delicious these were here these I just didn't take down all that land out there where the pasture is and the grapes and those different kinds of fruit trees yeah that was all huge red delicious trees oh wow and a red delicious if you have the best year ever and they were all clean you still wouldn't make any money cuz nobody wants them anymore yeah there's just so so many better apples now real dark boy that's that old Apple taste so overall how many acres are we at uh 40 so it's just sort of a big variety I mean I'm not trying to make a living farming I'm 75 you know I'm just having fun and how did you get into this well I always wanted to be a farmer cuz my uncles and my grandfather were farmers and I told my mom when I was in high school I want to be a farmer and she said well you're not going to inherit a farm everything costs so much money the tractors and the land and everything I saw that so I worked until I was 51 and I realized I could retire and buy a farm I said well I'm going to stop and look in peonia that's where all the cherries used to come from and I walked into a real estate place and this lady took me around and she uh showed me about 12 places of what I told her my budget was didn't like any of them and then she said well there's this other place it's three times your budget are you interested in looking I said yeah and I came and looked and I saw it was like perfect it had the river ran through it it had a spring up on the hill that I could get gravity water from and it was it was perfect next to the soccer fields the guy was a great guy that owned the farm I told him you know I could buy this but I couldn't get the money for a year have to sell everything and he said okay I'll wait for you and shook my hand he said and I'll help you for a year cuz I didn't know I didn't know how to do anything he was just the greatest guy and he did and he helped me for a year and and that was 20 years ago did you build this house yeah that's what I did to make a living was I would design and build houses so I knew what I wanted to build passive solar house you want to design it so you have as many windows as you can on the south side and as few as possible on the North so this is facing directly south and the greenhouse is facing south there's very few windows on the North side and then you want it to be insulated well of course and you want to have as much mass as you can inside the house some of these interior walls are concrete walls and the slab is of course concrete and it's got styrofoam below it so it warms up and holds the heat that rock wall is about 8 in thick over there so there's a lot of mass in here and the greenhouse is attached to the house directly all right where we at there's the garden you got strawberries and tomatillos and tomatoes and peppers do you want to dig up a sweet potato yeah absolutely I didn't know you could grow a sweet potatoes in Colorado I just tried tried them one year and they did Fabulous I'll start at the end here wow those are huge look I broke that one in half darn it oh man look how big that is they spread out you got to be really careful digging them what do you do for your soil when we make wine there's a whole lot of uh grape seeds and skins there's some more down there and uh I put it and with the chickens and they mix it all around and then I put leaves on top of that and maybe hay about a foot high and the chickens mix it and poop in it and everything and then that's my compost and I just put it back in every year we flood this so there are rows where the water runs down we had a huge eggplant crop this year and they're still flowering ton of peppers are they sweet spicy these ones hair are hot these skinny ones and those are bell peppers down on there I like these I put in my eggs every morning these these red ones she just picked them all so you don't see much red but they will all turn red and then you have some birds and chickens yeah we have one goose and a bunch of chickens for the eggs the goose sat on some chicken eggs this year and got them to hatch she may be getting older but she used to lay like 22 eggs a year all in the spring we did we got that from somebody that had a bunch of little baby geese and we had a male too but he was just too obnoxious and these solar panels are they used for these are photovoltaic cells and for the house yeah and there's more up there and then in the house there's some batteries and they just are kept topped off but if the power goes out they come on and take over before you would even know like if you're listening to a song on the radio you would never know that the power went out I wanted back up in case the power went out I'm not saying I think it would happen but I think it would be relatively easy for somebody to knock out the power in the United States so we're moving in here when the zombies come this would be a good place to be there's the batteries so if the power ever goes out in the house those come on instantly and run everything but the 220 and what's 220 is is uh the hot water heaters and the electric stove I call this the barn this is a cooler that I made because I read about a thing on the internet called the coolbot and it's just this little thing about this big but it costs about 600 bucks and you get a regular window unit air conditioner and you follow the instructions and redo the wiring on the window unit so it'll cool down to like 32 or 3° and it's got 4 in of Styrofoam you could hang meat in here that's what that's for fruit keeps a long time in here so this is our cooler I keep it in here for maybe 3 or 4 months not year round honey crisp over there there's styrofoam below the floor and there's like a 2in styrofoam on the inside and then another 2in on the outside and then fiberglass insulation in the stud walls so it's it's pretty sealed this is the cool but this thing and that's just a westing house window unit it works well hope you guys enjoyed the tour don't forget to like And subscribe if you like these types of videos really helps our Channel grow and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Stefano Creatini

Views: 331,527

Keywords: permaculture, passive greenhouse, homesteading, pineapple, bananas, regenerative agriculture, gardening, south facing greenhouse, olive trees, pineapple plants, easy greenhouse construction, heating a house with a greenhouse, greenhouse tour, tropical fruits, high mountains, colorado, passive solar house, winter greenhouse, coffee plants, avocado trees, solar greenhouse, growing bananas, figs, building a greenhouse, lettuce, tomatoes, swiss chard, citrus trees

Id: f5_fK7PNw1Q

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024