Ultimate Greenhouse Grows Tropical Fruit With No Power Or Heating

[Music] hey everyone today we are in menai Utah we're going to check out an off-grid Greenhouse as well as a 1 acre Homestead they got everything from Rabbits chickens milk cows and milk goats Nate is going to give us a tour today of his amazing Place let's go Nate Christensen with the Mante Homestead we're a pretty active modern family we're having baby n my wife's uh stay-at-home mom I'm a banker but yet we're trying to do some of the things the old way trying to be a little bit more self-sufficient I want to show you inside this greenhouse so we're almost at our 2-year anniversary everything you're going to see inside has been what we've grown without any electricity no heaters no fans so no no inputs this is all just using mother nature to grow some food all right come on in this is coming upon our our two-year anniversary so July 2nd will be two years in our walipini this is a unique design that we came up with because we really wanted to force a design that would allow an off grid solution to grow food so what you see here is 2 years without any electricity without any fans so we've got some really cool plants like passion fruit and we're growing lemons and bananas in Utah where normally we don't have any of that kind of stuff our grow season here is horrible and that was uh some of the impulse to do this is how can we grow more food and be more sustainable year round and and get us you know the the kind of nutrition that we need baby number nine is is coming and so this is a way to get my family to work and it's also a way for us to be a little bit more self-sufficient this was a lot of money and this was a lot of effort but it's also worth it that's that's what I'm that's what I'm for that's why I'm a husband and a father I've got to do stuff like this to think longterm how can I truly help my family in times of need enough of that talk let's look at some of the fun stuff something that's been kind of fun Peppers cabbage uh broccoli cauliflower we've been eating those year round in fact the the the peppers don't look at my plant right now cuz we haven't picked the poor thing they're all just coming back into Blossom we've had those All Seasons so we've had access to Pepper Peppers the full time around which is kind of fun so what's this down here so to make something truly off- grid we had to to really take some fantastic designs from a bunch of different greenh houses and what you're looking at here is what what I call a cold air drop the idea with that is that your cold air is is going to be more dense so that cold air sets into the bottom of the greenhouse we want that cold dense air to go even further away from the bottom of the greenhouse so that we can have growth um on this sunken level of the greenhouse cuz we have bananas grown over here and citrus grown right here so this is just a 2T tube I made out of barrels and so it goes down 6 fet and then there's a little a tube that will vent so it it's an 8 in tube that goes 20t in a diagonal over here on the grow bed that acts like a little chimney so it's not I'm not saying that that's going to warm up the greenhouse but what it is going to do is it's going to encourage and force more of that dense air down into the cold air drop so I I did a video on it's my Construction video number two I believe where I showed how I I did this and I threw a smoke bomb in here in the wintertime so the smoke from that smoke bomb it actually doesn't come up here it actually vents out that way showing basically showing the process of the air the cold air going down and then venting up a greenhouse is nothing but contradictions we have to have a wall of glazing to let sunlight in so the plants can grow well but this is going to be an R3 so then you have to combat that with just an overe excess an over compens ation of insulation and then also the big part you'll see on the back wall is thermal Mass so we've got 2,000 gallons of water in the winter time that is getting its full sun and so that thermal Mass has to collect heat during the the winter days and then the insulation has to hold that heat in because we know so much of of the heat is going to be lost out of the necessary glazing so again it's just like this big science experiment this big contradiction this big fight if you do it right if you find the balance you can have something that can grow even in Utah even in the snow it's awesome I love it this is basically our the part of excess right in the middle of the greenhouse we're growing passion fruit and bananas and oranges and lemons and so sometimes I have to admit yeah this is not part of the greater impulse to be self-sufficient but you know what it's fun having eight kids who I want to teach how to work and to get into the greenhouse this is kind of my way of of getting them excited to come out and to be a part of the greenhouse so this middle section here with the tropics is a little bit more of a of a reward and kind of a motivation to come out here and do the hard work on the other stuff that will be self- sustaining you have a couple of Nemesis in a greenhouse one of them is obviously how do you keep it warm in the winter and that's what we just addressed the thermal Mass right in the summer though I see more green houses that have failed because they're simply too hot right off the bat my main number one concern was how do we not burn up because even though we're up in the mountains in Utah in in the summertime we'll get up to 100° outside so how do I make sure that this investment doesn't just burn up and all my green plants go Brown and so the way that we hit this greenhouse is and I think it's one of the keys to the success of it is we have an insulated curtain that we roll down in the winter time this is an 18-in stem wall that we designed in the the greenhouse that curtain only gives me an R5 but it closes it up through all the cold winter months so in the summer here in about maybe 2 or three more weeks we will roll that insulated curtain up and that will give me an 18in Gap in the greenhouse so 18 in by3 Ft so we have massive amounts of ventilation so hot air from outside even on a hot day a 100° day you have the air from outside coming in and you have the even hotter air going up and out the greenhouse so what you have is a natural like I don't need fans in the summertime we have natural amounts of convection and the plants Thrive they Thrive because it's warm and they Thrive because they have that ventilation that's required I also have grading on there so I can allow the pollinator so I can allow bees to fly in and out and they do the honey bees find US every year but the key to keeping this thing cool is that ventilation is one but the other thing is simply I call it a plant canopy I figured that I was going to have to buy an expensive uh shade cloth to assist in the summertime but what we what we did is we planted a whole bunch of vines we planted watermelons we had squash and we had them just growing from the ceiling that first year before we had all these tropical plants because plants they naturally carry water into their leaves they know how to cool themselves so we have all of this plant matter for intermittent shade and also to get all that water into the air to help us cool it down and it does so we we don't go over 100° and in the summer months things things explode in here so this is another kind of tree of indulgence you know so this is a tangelo tree we've grown a couple of other citrus trees as well but we were just told that tangula was like the best of all oranges and it is it is truly delicious do you want to try one yeah let's do it so for the people watching in Florida this is not a big deal I'm inan Utah this is a really big deal okay okay try that all right let's see wow I don't know there's just something about homegrown anything is just so much better right that was delicious isn't that good yeah here you have a ton of blackberries yeah so right when you come in the greenhouse in the summer it gets it gets pretty hot and so we immediately did some Blackberry canopies cuz we wanted that intermittent shade and then the blackberries are kind of just a beautiful byproduct of having a blackberry bush in a greenhouse this size 17 ft by 103 ft long we found that microclimates so even though we have blackberries on this side and blackberries on that side right across from each other this one this one has blossomed first now for for two different seasons this one blossoms about a month later the one up front blossoms in about two weeks from now and the big question everybody has on these type of greenhouse videos is how do you deal with mold and then how do you deal with pest oh wow she came just in time so we have tried to approach the greenhouse As Natural as we can a friend of mine Mike who has a greenhouse he brought them in for Aphid control so I'm trying to measure exactly how much these finches do help when it comes to aphids but we believe it is working with aphids we're bringing in the finches about 7 months ago we had a slug problem unlike you've ever known and we just had thousands of slugs and I'm like oh crap why do we have so many slugs guess what we figured out frogs we went to the to the store I can never find them we bought two of those uh the bright green tree frogs and then my kids went out west and and got some toads and so we just brought frogs and toads in here I don't see them and and we have hardly any slugs natural you know what I mean like I was going to buy all this Sluggo and pay my daughters 10 cents a slug which wouldn't have been feasible like Mother Nature has a way of kind of balancing itself and really that's what a walipini is isn't it I love it these guys want to come hang out with us is they're beautiful birds and they don't want to fly out if you leave the door open by accident yeah so I I designed my doors so that so my doors and my windows all have that this grading on them so that the pollinators can come in but the birds can't go out so in theory they could fly out when we go in and out but we've never lost one that way they're fun and they create an Ambiance again I'm trying to measure how many apids they actually eat can't answer that for sure but I do know that they're fun so we just barely you know planted some other citrus trees as well so the the greenhouse is is really young so here in a couple years you know we'll have mature trees but our first year we did get lemons and tangelos and passion fruit as far as like some of the more interesting exotic stuff I've got some some kiwi vines that are growing and then these are dragon fruit here on the back wall they take three years before they actually produce but we've got uh three different dragon fruit I didn't know dragon fruit was a cactus and kiwi was a Vine we're learning some stuff these are artichokes they're just you know another fun plant my kids were kind of weird but on Sundays we just come out here and pick 10 of these dip them in butter and mayo and and just go crazy on them this is the pomegranate uhhuh yeah and see I didn't know pomegranate was a bush there's a lot of things you don't know in Utah like pretty much know potatoes carrots and onions in Utah this whole bed was just clear full of cabbage and broccoli and so we just pulled all that out and so all of this we're just planting by seed so I'm trying to I'm trying to get good enough that I can mix up my Harvest times with my planning time to create a rotation here in a couple months these beds will actually look look pretty full we've just barely redone them so wow look at all your vegetables here lettuce man these are delicious so the one thing that we're trying to do we noticed early on that we were having a hard time getting cilantro and celery to grow from seed so that was at the time when we were having the slug infestation and what we've been trying to do as a result of that is we're like okay okay I I love buying seeds but even better would be to collect seeds but even better than that is we've just been letting certain places go to seed so right here you see we have an old cilantro plant that's just going to seed and we can do a lot more we can just put put more more plants out to rot let Mother Nature do its thing it wants to multiply and replenish you know this is my luck so when we decided to to break ground two years ago we went right immediately into the the 2021 supply chain issues and so our concrete we had a issue with the concrete getting here everything was just really costly and the time was come to do the polycarbonate and the framing and so even though it was 100° outside we put all of these trusses up really in one week so in one week we had the trusses up with the polycarbonate on there and that was just hugely rewarding so then we turned to the next phase which was just simply putting on like a metal roof so the the backside of the greenhouse is just simply a metal roof I've got some 4-in pearlins going across you know to give support to the metal above it and then we hired a company to come and do the spray foam when they were in here the temperature at the peak was 140° I mean that kid had to be in a full respirator outfit anyway and I mean when he take his mask off I mean he was just sweating I thought he was going to just faint so once once that metal was up there we just sprayed that spray foam because it is closed cell so it's not going to have the risk of the mildew and everything else and it's done really well and so you just ran electrical here just for lighting the part of me that wants to be self-sufficient and to provide for my family it's all about redundancies well what if this doesn't work see cuz when I built this I didn't know it was going to work so I ran a power line from my house to to the greenhouse so I have I have lights in here and I could run fans if I needed to I've just never done it literally I've never plugged into that so the other thing that you'll notice is I did put a propane line in here so let's say that we had some kind of issue and uh we didn't have light for a month I just wanted a redundancy so my redundancy there is I I have a propane line and I could put propane heaters in here if if for some reason I didn't have enough input to warm up the greenhouse so this last winter those propane heaters they remained in the garage like we didn't even bring them out here this is a design that has worked so far for two Winters one and a half Summers without electricity without any inputs without any fans this is this is what it does in worst case [Music] scenario I'm really excited to show you the the meat rabbits the the one thing I do like about meat rabbits it just rains so I can't pick this up but their compost is like green gold it it really is because we can take this straight from the rabbit hutch from the rabbit colony and right into the greenhouse you don't have to dilute it it's not too hot doesn't have excess nitrogen with 100ft Greenhouse house we need compost so it's almost worth doing the meat rabbits for the compost the other thing I like about meat rabbits this variety here is New Zealand I've tried other meat rabbits like champagne but these ones the meat really is fantastic so if you have a little bit of space which we don't have a lot of space here we have seven moms and and now we have about 30 35 babies and we're not even to like the peak breeding time the amount of feed to the amount of protein ratio like meat rabbits are are literally amongst the best the most efficient animal out there for a backyard source of protein they're fun they're cute my kids actually don't really consider these guys pets and so that's good it tastes as good as chicken maybe a little bit better in my opinion but I know exactly what they've been fed I know that it's it's safe for my family so I've always wanted to even have just a small Colony that I could ramp up so if things went into scarcity or if I became even further concerned with food supply so the avail AB ility as well just as well as the food quality I can ramp these up very quickly I love that my colony is unique because we have insulated coolers these rabbits can go down in into these homemade burls that I made through a little corrugated pipe and we actually have two more sets of rabbits baby rabbits that will be coming out so we just had babies two days ago I didn't even know I just checked them this morning in the summertime these rabbits can actually the the male rabbits if they get too hot they go sterile so having these Underground homemade Burrows will let me control the burrow system I don't want them I I tried letting them burrow naturally but they kept on collapsing their burls this is more controlled I think it's more efficient the coolers give them insulation in the ground and the result is we got a lot of production they breed like bunnies Okay so this is outside of our rabbit colony and all that I've done here is I've just created a a door to keep these coolers out of the rain out of the moisture and then and in here I have just regular what are these 16g coolers that I got from Walmart if you can find them at a thrift store even better right here I just have a 6in corrugated tube that's their tunnel so it simulates a natural rabbit tunnel but again I'm not going to have dirt collapsing on them the individual mommies come down here see all this fur that's because we got little babies I love it when they're hungry cuz they they pop up like popcorn they're trying to find Mama so these are only a couple of days old and the mom will naturally come in here when it gets hotter you'll come in and they'll be uncovered right now it's just a little bit cold so she's come in and take care of them and our coolers are just helping simulate an environment where a mom would normally dig under the ground and have her babies that's all that this is doing is is recreating that in a safe environment look at the baby goats over here can you see those so the goats is a new addition to the homestead so our main backyard source of milk is from our two Mini Jersey cows over here so the mama is laying down she's the white cow she's actually a 90 96% miniature Jersey but she just has the genetics from her grandma so this is her I think her fifth baby that she's had it's another another girl so here in a couple of months we'll be able to breed another mini Jersey and then we'll actually start being able to get some return on our investment my wife doesn't like it when I talk about Investments but these cows cost a lot of money up front for my wife who's a nutritionist is the benefit is you get fresh UNP pasturized milk so we do a calf share but we still get a gallon of milk for our family daily a month AG goes a gallon and a half with a calf share so if we wanted more milk we could just simply kick the calf off and get more milk we decided to add these additional milk goats to the homestead just kind of as a way for future trade and barter a lot of people who have lactose intolerant needs they can actually have goat milk or they can have A2 A2 milk from from jerseys and so we can trade and Bar if we wanted to but but again this is a backyard supply of milk we know exactly what these animals have been fed and we can control the quality which I think is becoming more and more of a concern how do we have make sure we have a supply chain and how do we make sure that that supply chain is actually truly safe and and uh good for our families this is Shasta she's born in October she'll be ready to breed here in a couple of months and then mama will give birth I think in October as well well so we'll have another baby and depending on we we obviously want a heer they're worth more money cuz we're only going to keep two but we're going to breed these two so we can sell babies we want to have two milk cows so we can actually alternate cuz you do after a while you do want to dry the mom up and get her pregnant again so that you can refresh all those hormones so you can get that uh you know Prime optimal milk production but jerseys are known for I mean they're known for their butter content they're just my wife could tell you a little bit better as far as that but she makes yogurts and we make homemade ice cream all the time and these go for 5,000 plus right the cool thing about them is they're they're shorter they have a lot less body mass to them so you're feeding them half as much yeah you're only getting 1 to two gallons where you could be getting four to six with a big Jersey but I'm on one acre and so there's tons of benefits for backyard you know miniature jerseys because of that the Market's higher so yeah I had to pay a little bit for Mama but we already have sold her bowl and pretty much broke even well I was so excited for a heer I'm like oh my gosh that's like probably six grand but it's not because it's zero because Becca wants to keep her but but when we have when we have the next baby then that's when we can start getting some money and maybe paying a little bit for the hobby if the hobby can sustain itself that's always better but the main reason from a from a self-sufficiency standpoint is that I've got Pure backyard milk access for my family we drink a lot of milk and how do you get them pregnant so we're kind of Lucky cuz there's a there's a couple of small mini Jersey herds here so when we sold her Bowl we actually sold them back to a gentleman so we sold it for a certain amount of money with one guaranteed live breeding so we'll actually go take her to a bowl here in town but you can also there's there's different people that have artificial straws so you can have a vet come in and artificially impregnate them as well it's just way more effective if you can do it naturally it it just takes it's a lot more effective so we feel lucky cuz we don't have the space for the bowl and we don't want to have the feed so if we have to spend 500 bucks to go get her bread then that's a lot of time and feed that we don't have to expend because we have people locally with Bulls hope you guys enjoyed today's tour don't forget to like and give the thumbs up I'll put a link down below for Nate's YouTube channel so you can see how he built these greenh hous he's got great construction videos as well as planting and just talking more about his designs and his Urban Homestead

Channel: Stefano Creatini

Views: 19,731

Keywords: off grid greenhouse, utah greenhouse, 1 acre homestead, mini jersey, new zealand rabbits, permaculture, passive greenhouse, gardening, urban farm, building an off grid greenhouse, greenhouse project

Id: dPOvAJbchY0

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024