One Straw's Hoop House Barnraising

One Straw Rob documented his hoop-house barn raising last month. I'm totally jealous. How useful are greenhouses? You can also build hoop houses for your chickens. You can grow fresh fodder for your cows.  In short, just about anything you can't grow in winter because of the cold can be moderated by a hoop house + thermal mass. One Straw Rob is in Wisconsin (it get cold there) so he needs the added edge of a compost-heater that uses mesophilic bacteria to generate heat. That bastard---making us all look bad.

Solar Greenhouses: Fresh Food in Winter

I saw a greenhouse kit in Costco recently (one of a few) and I thought that certainly someone must have done it better. They have. Solar greenhouses aren't just designed to capture solar energy, but also store it and distribute it well over time and in different zones for different kinds of plants.

What is especially telling in these older books is the desire to maintain these systems without the use of oil-based energy for heating them in the dead of winter.