Geodesic Dome Greenhouse 2.0

The greenhouse is dead. Long live the greenhouse!

After 9 years with us, and at least 3 years with the previous owners, our old greenhouse was rotting out. Spruce wood and high humidity don’t mix well, and some of the boards hardly had any solid wood left. But even in this condition, the dome could support my weight when I hung from the top.But it was time to go and in late May we tore it down and gathered materials to make a new one.


The new dome would be the same footprint, but with a different connection style. We used ABS pipes as hubs instead of having the wood come together in complex joints. This made cutting the wood pieces much easier.

The plans we used: https://acidome.com/lab/calc/#Flat_7/12_Piped_D90_3V_R2.75_beams_50.8×38

This dome is a 7/12th dome (just over half a sphere)

It is 5.4 meters across (or 18 ft, or approximately 1/20th a football field for my American friends), and just over 3 m or 10 ft high at the centre.

165 boards in 5 different lengths (would be just 3 but we want a flat base).

61 pieces of ABS pipe cut into rings as connectors.

Once the frame is up, you have to cover it. We ordered some greenhouse grade poly to cover it, but then there is the challenge of covering a partial sphere with a flat material. We ended up going in in rows.

The peak of our dome is a pentagon, so we decided to do one piece for the whole top to reduce the chance of leaks. This mean we had to do some folding to get it over the curve, but the folds are hidden under the cedar straps we put on. The plastic is stapled in place, then thin wooden straps to help hold it down in the wind.

The peak is hard to do as it is all ladder work. You could probably climb the structure, but cedar is a weak wood and I didn’t want to trust it.

We decided to cut the greenhouse plastic into strips rather than larger geometric shapes. It worked pretty well, and it gives good overlap from one layer on down. We were often able to do 4 or 5 triangles in a row at a time.

Putting up the center and the next layer down were the hardest, and that layer we had to work around the two windows. Lower than that it got much easier.

Putting on the plastic skin took a lot longer than I thought as each piece had to be cut out, stapled, and then straps put on to help hold the plastic in place.

Once the inside ladder work was done you can see Naomi at work planting tomatoes and peppers.

Grapey McGrapes Grapes

We planted valiant grapes when we first purchased our house a few years back. After a couple of years we started to get a handful of grapes. Then in 2014, we built a trellis for the grapes, and things started to really go well.

Grapes in Alberta

This trellis is over 10 ft tall, and since then the vines have taken over the trellis and now grow up the wall.

Alberta Grapes!

The first year with the trellis we harvested 3kg (6.8 lbs) of grapes. We thought that was a lot.

6 lbs of grapes

Then in 2015 we harvested 5kg (11 lbs), almost double!

Grapes

This year… perhaps it was the extra rains, perhaps it was just more established plants, or maybe it was our expert care (more negligence really), but this year, we harvested 11.8 kg (26 lbs) of grapes!20160915-dsc03449When we went out to start harvesting we pulled back the front layer of leaves to see the vines covered with clusters of grapes. We had to set aside the bowls we had taken to get a box.

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Anyway, this will be a ridiculous amount of work to process. We will have to rethink our to deal with this many grapes for next year. However, I don’t expect it to quadruple the yield.

Update: Naomi was able to make about 22 L of grape juice, and and around 6.5 L of grape jelly!

How does your garden grow?

GreenhouseMost of the garden is growing very well again this year. Naomi is going with more indeterminate tomatoes (climbing up instead of bushy plants), and we are attempting some sweet potatoes! Not normally grown in Canada, this is a special variety that has been bred for Canadian summers. We only found out after we ordered that they were not good in greenhouses, but in Alberta, that is the only place we will be able to grow them.

We moved our shed up beside our house and made the land where it was into a garden. It was a late start as we only got the shed moved in early July, but the plants are making up for lost time after being planted in warm soil. Nice to have a potato patch in the yard.

We have expanded the foodscaping with a new garden in the front yard this year. This has been the sunniest part of our property, but has only been a patch of lawn. The kids don’t even play out on it as it is right next to a very busy street, so it is very nice to start making it productive. Once we cut down our sickly poplar earlier in the Spring, we could finally begin to put in some bushes and other plants. To start, we just have three types of cherries, three blueberries, a couple goji berries, and some strawberries. Oh, and some flowers and rose bushes. Next year we will mix in some more edible landscaping!

[click an image for a caption]

Watermelons

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This year we are growing some watermelons in our greenhouse. The seeds took a long time to germinate, but once they started growing, they grew very fast. Each day I would go to the greenhouse and you could see how much they had grown, with the vines reaching higher every day and we would have to detangle them from the other plants. I decided to take a time lapse to see the growth and motion of these plants. This was done in the greenhouse with the door closed and no fans, so there isn’t any wind blowing things around in there. I expected the vine’s tendrils to move around as they search for something to grip onto, but not for the whole thing to move this much. This was shot over 4 hours, with one picture every 60 seconds.

A watermelon blossom.

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The first melon on July 14th.

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The melons themselves also grew very fast, sometimes up to 4 or 5 cm a day! These photos were from July 18 and 19.

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August 27th.

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We had heard that you can tell when a watermelon is ripe when the little tendril immediately above it starts to dry up.

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So here is our first watermelon in late August. It was 57.5 cm in diameter, and weighed 3.25 kg (7 lbs, 2.4 oz).

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It wasn’t quite as red as we expected it to be on the inside, and we maybe could have left it on the vine for another week or so. However, it was still delicious!

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Foodscaping

Cherries

Most people like a yard with nice landscaping. Trees, shrubs, etc.

I like foodscaping – landscaping with food.

As we can afford to, we have been working to make our property more productive, while trying to maintain the nice looks of the yard. Our yard came with an abundance of cottoneaster (a.k.a. catoni aster) shrubs. Three of the corners of our house have these large plants which can make a nice, shape-able hedge. There are two more in the front garden, and two complete hedges along the back and one side of our backyard. I would love to replace the hedge across the back with something that would give us edible berries, but that would take quite a bit of work to dig them up, and we would have to do without the privacy for a few years until something else grew into the spot.

This spring we ripped out the one on the front corner of the house and planted two saskatoon berries. The saskatoons are native to this area and can grow to be quite large and have a small berry that looks like a blueberry, but not quite as flavourful. I plan to replace a few more of these around the house this summer.

useless hedge plants

useless hedge plants – the big one in the corner has been replaced by saskatoons

Hedge out, saskatoons in Saskatoons

Speaking of blueberries, last year we planted four bushes and they survived our relatively mild winter this past year and we will be getting some berries in a few weeks. Probably only a handful this year, but as the plants get established there will be more.

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Since moving in to this house we have planted three apple trees (one just last summer), and after a few years of them getting established, we are going to get some apples this year. We have Goodland, Parkland, and Battleford varieties, but only the Goodland looks like it is going to produce this year. Unfortunately, the tree has dropped a good percentage of its apples, so I need to do some research to find out what is going on.

Goodland Apples

This year our two haskap (a.k.a. blue honeysuckle) were producing. The bushes are still small so here isn’t a lot of them, but they taste great! They are ripe by around mid June and were the first things outside the garden we could eat. I think we could have had some last year, but the birds got them first. I hope to plant a few other varieties of haskap soon.

Haskap berries

 

Haskap berries

We also have around 35 strawberry plants in the gardens and a few other spots on property, so we will be enjoying quite a few of these this summer. First strawberry of the year was June 29, and now we can get a small bowl full every second day.

First strawberry of the year.

FoodscapingStrawberries

Nanking and Carmine Jewel cherries are growing nicely and we plan to plant more of these in the yard soon.

Cherries

The raspberries are producing lots.

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Carmine jewel cherries, strawberries, and raspberries from the foodscaped yard.

Looks like we will have some red and black currents too.

Red currants

Black currants

We will also have choke cherries, but those taste awful. They can be added to jams and such though, but with lots of sugar.

Our grape vines are doing well, and looks like we will have a good crop this year. We are having a bit of a problem with some grape rust moths though.

Grapes

Last year’s grape harvest looked like this!

6 lbs of grapes

Foodscaping is an investment that sometimes takes years before you start to see a payoff. But when it comes, it is a sweet and tasty payoff.