UNDERGROUND GREENHOUSE Update — Ep. 186

Last year, we covered the buildout of a DIY underground greenhouse constructed by our friends Scott and Crystal Van Gesbeck at Under the Tree Farms. We thought we'd give you an update on their progress now that the planting season is upon us. I think the last time we were here, you didn't have any of these stones for the garden at all, right? It was, remember, it was just like foam. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, more rocks. More rocks. There's rocks everywhere. I did this kind of hastily. I got to redo this. It's a little loose in spots. I got to redo a couple spots. And I put in some more drainage, and there's no water problem at all anymore. I think in the first video it was leaking, and I just added this drip edge under the roof. I didn't really have an overhang, because there's not really a way to make the polycarbonate itself overhang. But this worked. Good. It doesn't come in. There's your figs. Here's the figs. Your figs, your figs. So until a few days ago, the floor was just covered. There weren't really walkways. It was just covered with flats of stuff that's moved into the high tunnel. So I can finally get to the figs, and I just put up the first wire here. I just put a low wire, and I'm kind of training the figs down to it. The system is a Japanese system, or step-over, they call it. They'll just be low cordons, one or two. I don't really care if it's sloppy or whatever. The idea is just to kind of cover the ground with places to have buds and shoots that come up every year. Keep it pruned down to that cordon every year. And still keep a little walk path kind of thing? Yeah, and then every year, shoots will come up in the spring from that cordon, and they'll come up. And they probably grow about this high if it's like figs in the other greenhouse in a year. But I'll probably kind of tip them right about here. And then from here down should be like a stick of figs. Maybe five, maybe even ten figs on the stick, and the stick's about a foot apart. Kind of tied to a couple wires here. Almost like you would raspberries or something. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Do you feel like it's too small? Yeah. It felt like it was way too small when I had all my plants in here. Before we covered that other high tunnel. It's like, this is for my figs, it's not for your plants. And my plants are in here still too, I have to pick them up. I'm like calm now, it was insane. Just like, yeah, because we probably have what, like three, four hundred flats of stuff? Yeah, it takes up space. I even felt like, I'm like, oh, we have to take the flats back from Crystal and Scott, and I'm like, we're not going to be able to fit them in the back of the car. We only have like six or seven of them. Yeah, great. So what we've got up here is kind of just like the second wave of stuff. Yeah. And a few things like the peppers that really want it nice and warm at night. It is toasty in here. It's toasty, it's a cold day, it's been completely cloudy all day. Yeah, what has been the temperature in here on those cold days? Because this is nice. Yeah, like this during the day. You know, I know, what is this, like 70? It feels 70-ish. You know, like kind of high humidity, so it's a little hard to tell. And then in the evening, it's noticeable in here, it'll just hold this heat for several hours after dark. You go in a high tunnel, the temperature will start to drop, but there's absolutely no danger of it freezing here, even if it went down to like 15 tonight, it would be fine. And in the dead of winter, at first we didn't have the heat and the floor turned on, so it was just performing on whatever solar whatever. I don't even remember you having steps. Oh, okay. We didn't even have a floor last night. Yeah, I don't think, yeah, okay. No, we did the floor. Like the middle of the winter. Yeah. It was snow outside. Yeah. We actually mixed our own concrete in a cement mix around a tractor and poured the floor, and we put heat tubes in, and there's a glycol solution in them and a heat exchanger that hooks up to the wood-fired boiler. So I was putting in 15,000 or so BTUs an hour into here from that. Before that, it would freeze, but it wouldn't go below about 20 to 23 even when it was like single digits outside. After that, it was occasionally like frosting a little bit if it would go down into single digits, and then we added this little cheapo vent into the air, you know, the plants love the CO2, a little space heater that we burned 30 gallons of propane in to keep this whole thing at like 65 at least day and night. And once we got, we have a heat mat there, electric heat mats, on a bed of gravel to hold heat. We started plants on that with a cover at night, and then once we wanted to... That's neat. It's kind of like the Chinese greenhouse, but inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I could put plastic on it, and it would probably hold in heat from the heat mat, but it was mainly just to cover them at night. Right. And we used this at first, and then once these things were ready to divide out, we put that heater on and just quickly filled the whole thing up with plants. They grow great. And like I said, the whole season was 30 gallons, about $100 worth of propane. And you'll see maybe in the other greenhouse how many plants we grew in here. It's like three times this many in there, I'd say. Oh, my God. Yeah. I guess the biggest, I mean, the biggest problem was it was so cloudy this winter. So if it were a sunny winter, we wouldn't have needed that. Yeah. It was very cloudy and gray and dour. Yeah. And then when we had that spell in the 80s, that weird, those weird hot days, you know, we got the roof vent open. You were saying you were making sure that there was a lot of venting. It's working great. We get a great cross ventilation when that vent down there and this one here open up. It just, you know, almost all the time, that would keep it from overheating. And then just like if it's going to be a really hot, sunny day, we'd open the roof, you know, a few inches, and then that and the vents would keep it good. Haven't needed a fan yet. Yeah. That's good. I mean, but we haven't hit the height. Oh, we will. We will. But it's a cool greenhouse. It's like the high tunnels are hotter in the middle of the day than in here because it's working really well. All this exposed masonry is soaking up all the heat. And it'll be, you know, there's all this radiation coming in, but it's just getting soaked up. And then you can really feel it in the evening after the sun goes down. It's like a sauna almost. You come in here and you can feel, like, it's like that hot parking lot in the evening feeling. Like, you know, like you're in a big parking lot and it's a summer evening and it's chilly air, but like the parking lot is like, you're like, whoa, it's warm. Right. So in the summer months, do you think you're primarily just going to have the figs in here? Well, yeah, well, up here, so the main stuff we started in here so far was like vegetable, perennials, flowers, stuff like that. I've got a few. This is some, these are the figs that made it. They're actually a third sold now. And then I have some blueberries and trumpet vines and just odds and ends. And then I have, under the benches, I have cuttings and stuff. And then down here I have chestnuts. He's been doing the, like, woody propagation. And like lemons and stuff. Yeah, you can smell the Meyer lemon. Yeah. It's frustratingly yellow, but it smells good. It's full, it's full of flowers. Yeah. It's full of foliage. It had been downstairs. I moved it up here. It's liking life better up here a lot. It was looking pretty sickly down there. So these are all chestnut seedlings. Some more over there. I've got some shell bark hickory just coming up, those, like, red thread things. Oh, right on. Then under the benches here, I have a whole nother bunch of chestnut seedlings, seeds that haven't germinated yet. Are these, like, Chinese chestnuts? American chestnuts? These are hybrid Japanese-European chestnuts for nut production. Okay. And we're going to put in a half acre or so of them. We had some at the other place. We have a few here, and I'm going to put in, like, a little block of them. Nice. And I'm into grafting. I mean, I'll be selling them. By grafting, we have some named varieties that I'll graft onto these. So a lot of stuff I'm working on this year is going to be nursery stock for two years out. Okay. The next thing, once all this clears out of here, I have a whole bunch of seed stratifying for rootstocks for apples and pears and quince and peach and cherry and apricot. So I'm going to be growing... Busy year, busy year. I think you should have built this twice the size. I know, it's not big enough. He really likes doing all these, like, trees and woody things. I'm the one who does all the, like, plant starts. I love fruit, yeah, vegetables. Yeah. You should tell them about that wall that wasn't there, that, like, the metal. Oh, this one? Oh, yeah. Well, I insulated the wall with Styrofoam. Okay. And then instead of covering it with wood or anything, this stuff is, like, it increased the light level and it bounces the light around in such a way that it's very even in here. So things aren't leaning so much. Cool. Not really leaning at all there, which is kind of amazing given that they're right up against the side of a building and it faces west. How much insulation did you put in there? There's two inches of the foil-faced polyisosanurates. That's like R14. Some boards. It's not a lot. Did you need to put it there for a reason? The insulation? Yeah. Yeah, because that's the wall of the shed. That's not inside. That's not heated space on the other side. I see. Okay. Yeah. That's just an equipment shed. And I ran the insulation, like, down into the ground in a trench to try to insulate. This whole thing, it's all about insulating all the soil under it. Right. It's very similar to the passive house that we just saw. Yeah, it's the same idea. They don't have the foundation going in the ground. In the ground. They actually bring the foam out so they can warm the soil around it. Same idea. Thermal battery. Yeah. Exactly. Do you have any specific questions? I mean, I think... Show us your little water line. Oh, yeah. The hose always gets tangled, you know, and this way you can just, you know, you can just walk down here. Or then if you want to go back down here, you know. That's so funny. They sell a kit for like $300, but we just bought these little pulleys. Yeah. You know. Plant pipe clamps. He basically just took some random scrap metal and bent it to a curve and then clamped the hose onto it. And there's never more than, like, a little bit of hose so it can't get tangled. Yeah. You know, it's still in the way, but, like, you can't... It can't be, like, under the bench and wrapped around something and then you pull on it and it kinks, you know, and it tips over a plant. And that's just a fence wire that it runs on. Yep. It's a high-tensile fence wire with one of those ratchet strainers. That was kind of essential to it. Yeah. Take a picture of that. Because that's a heavy hose, especially with water in it. This is the same stuff. Very heavy. This is the same stuff you used for the deer fence, didn't you? Yep. High-tensile. And then you can put a lot of tension on it so that it doesn't sag. You can get them online or at Tractor Supply. They're, like, $5. That's cool. Should we go see the greens? Yeah. The spillover greens that were in here before? There is a lot of spillover greens. A lot of these things need to be out. Look how the kiwis are doing. I'm, like, very excited. Look at this. These are the fuzzy kiwis. Usually they grow them up on an arbor kind of a thing in this, like, big trellis. They're usually spaced, like, 15 feet apart in a row. They're monsters. But they're hardy to zero Fahrenheit. That's not that bad. And they overwinter in, like, Brooklyn. So I'm excited about it. It might take over. They might have to go because they're too big. It's such a medley of plants. Yeah. Apples and currants we're selling at the market. Nice. What kind of apples? There's a connie and zestar, honeycrisp. I think there might be a golden russet and black oxford. Oh, well, you have a bit more space in here. So everything in here started in there. Yeah. And it's just, like, expanded out. It all graduated out to the side. Oh, my gosh. Which is not heated. And we had to have some friends help us cover it. Jeez, you've been looping. I've got all sorts of stuff. Yeah, we have a lot of ornamental stuff this year. Yeah, a lot of ornamental perennial flowers, annual flowers. Look at all that lavender there. Oh, my gosh. And then all these were just going to go, like, in our garden. But it rained so much, I had to pull them. Those were all outside to harden off. But when it rains two inches, you kind of can't have anything outside. I'm, like, surprised you don't have, like, animals come in here and, like, just. No, it's okay. Yeah. I mean, we have mouse traps everywhere in the other greenhouse. We've caught half a dozen mice. We have this resident groundhog that would just, like, come in here. I haven't seen any groundhogs up here. Really? The soil is so hard and rocky. Like, our old place was sandy gravel, and there was a groundhog hole, like, every 20 feet. Every time there was, like, a little bank in the edge of the field, it was just, like, a, you know, it was, like, a water ship down of groundhog holes, you know? It was, like, running across the driveway. And it was scary because, like, you could, like, break your ankle or the tractor. You'd get a wheel down in each one. Yeah, or, like, if anybody had horses, that was always a problem. I don't think I've seen a single one. I haven't seen them here. Yeah, they just don't. Too much stones. Yeah, too many stones. But, yeah. Ideally, this is not ideal to have them on the ground, especially since the soil is really rough. We had to, so we're planning on planting our cucumbers and some tomatoes. We have our first set of cucumbers and tomatoes planted in here. But once these plants are out, we're going to plant the rest of the cucumbers and tomatoes in here. And the soil, we needed to do some subsoiling, and we put, like, 10 yards of composted cow manure in here. I'm just, like, you can't even fit this all in your farmer's market. People should, like, e-mail you what they want in advance. I know, I know. So, yeah, go to the Ithaca's Farmer's Market. Like, check out the tree farms. Well, we're bringing a tent starting this weekend. Oh, you are? Yeah, we're bringing a tent. There's a Cornell Cooperative Extension plant sale. Oh, and the plant sale is coming up on the 19th. Yeah, that's right. All right, well, that's cool. Well, thanks for showing us, like, the updates. Yeah, I might actually purchase some stuff here while I'm over here. Sure, might as well get them, you know. Thanks so much. Stay tuned here for more videos at Flock. 10% of our Google AdSense revenue is reinvested back into community projects here in the Finger Lakes. And that's even matched by our partners over at Espoma Organic. So your support truly matters. We'll see you in the next video.