dome sweet dome
I’ve come to the conclusion that all but one of these spaghetti squashes need to go. I’m feeding the fish 6 times a day all they can eat and my nitrates are still at 0. For the record, these 4 squash plants gulp more nutrients than 300 heads of lettuce. I think I’m going to try and transplant them outside once it’s a little warmer.
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After we cleaned out all the aphids, we went to work replanting everything. We have around 8 tomato plants, 6 cucumber, 4 spaghetti squash, some herbs, and a lot of lettuce.
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The image above is a before and after I lost control of the aphid infestation. No, those spots in the right image aren’t dew or moisture, they’re all aphids in various stages of their lifecycle. Ever since I first turned everything on in the green house, I’ve had a small amount of ladybugs cohabitating with me. When I saw the first aphids, I introduced 1200 more to try to curb the issue, but soon learned that ladybug larvae are what really do most of the damage to aphids. At this point I am just throwing predatory insects at my problem willy nilly. Rather than spraying or doing something manual for the aphids, I just let the ladybugs do their jobs.
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In previous posts I’ve mentioned the humidity issues associated with a ventless gas heater. While the exhaust from burning natural gas or propane isn’t too bad bad toxicity wise, it creates a ton of water vapor. Seeing as we have around 2100 gallons of water constantly flowing through our system, the last thing we need is more moisture in the air.
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Winter 2020 has rolled around this January and things have been running relatively smoothly. We’ve been having great luck growing lettuce, peas, and beans. We even put up a hammock where we can kick back and soak in some vitamin D from the grow lights. It’s a nice, cozy spot to relax and read a book when the winter blues start to set in.
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In the last few posts I’ve briefly mentioned some things that need to be fixed or improved like the air system and grow cabinet. The soaker hose was a great idea in theory, but in practice it clogged often and was not practical to clean the 30′ lengths inside the greenhouse. The grow cabinet lighting wasn’t cutting it and our seedlings were still stretching.
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When this project began we knew that we’d have to have some sort of grow lighting if we planned on effectively growing throughout the long Michigan winters. I briefly explored the retail market for a lighting solution and quickly realized that that option was not in the budget.
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After completing the build out and grow beds, we’ve beens spending a few weeks learning the ins and outs of raising fish and diagnosing different symptoms with our plants.
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We’ve wrapped up the things that we were working on mentioned in the last walkthrough video. This means the waste treatment components are complete, our cabinets are installed, and we’re all set up to start seeds. While all this work was being done, we’ve been cycling the system with tilapia fingerlings and our nitrate levels are starting to rise.
Read moreLatest walkthrough of the greenhouse systems.
It’s been a few more weeks since my last update and I’ve been super busy learning some plumbing and figuring out the best configuration for all the water treatment steps. We’ve got the water flowing and I’m super stoked to go over the details. This was a lot of fun to figure out.
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I’ve been working a lot of hours on the weekend and after work and we’re finally almost ready to fill everything up with water and get the conditioning process started.
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It’s taken a few weeks working several hours every day after work, but we’re finished with grow bed construction. I’m sure these are super over engineered, but better safe that sorry for this much water.
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We’ve been super busy with our kiddo turning 6 months old and other spring things that needed to be done. That said, I wanted to briefly share an update on how the project is coming along.
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From the beginning of this project, I have been tying to figure out the best way to build grow beds that use the maximum amount of available space. The primary blocker has always been coming up with the best way to waterproof the beds which will be made out of wood. The original design included a simple grow bed design to lay out the space, but it wasn’t detailed enough to estimate materials and cost. We’ll discuss design updates, materials, and reasons for the choices we made below.
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The one thing that’s been holding up the rest of the work on the greenhouse is finishing the floors. The top floor is just osb subfloor and downstairs is treated plywood. I spent a long time trying to find a product like vinyl tiles or paneling of some sort, but always ran into the same issue. There are very few products out there that will survive large temperature swings.
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Now that we’re all caught up here and the weather is getting nicer, we’re looking to get back up to speed with the project. Here’s the roadmap for the next couple months.
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We survived the winter with flying colors! We have almost 3 feet of snow in the backyard, but the dome was awesome at shedding any snow accumulation. Everything remained water tight and we didn’t have any issues.
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Since we are planning to try to make this a year around greenhouse in a colder climate, we’re going to install two types of roof system. A standard roof on the north side and corrugated polycarbonate on the south side. This allows us to insulate the north side where we don’t get much sun and it saves us money because polycarbonate is not cheap.
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Now that we have the structure up and solid, we have a few things to do before we can install the traditional roof and polycarbonate.
With the lower building mostly complete and the backfilling well underway, we can finally start assembling the the dome structure. While we were confident that we could pull of this build, we were a bit apprehensive going into it considering our first dome failure. We were comforted by the fact that we could make the necessary adjustments with our piped hubs if we ran into a a similar situation this time around.
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Before we start on the dome, we need to get some other things squared away first. We want to finish running our utilities so we can backfill. This will make the dome construction a lot easier when we can work from the outside on solid ground.
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Now that we have the bottom floor in and the walls leveled, the top floor framing moved along fairly quick. Normally we’d install floor joists on top of the lower floor walls, but we wanted to make sure we were bracing the walls properly and we didn’t feel like trying to install rim joists on a 15 sided building.
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Now that we have a level base, we can start putting up walls. When I was drawing up the plans for the building I just made it look nice, I didn’t pay much attention to things like standard lumber sizes.
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Hurray for Spring! The ground is still a little soft, but we decided to get started anyways. We had a local excavator come out to dig our utility trench and the circular foundation.
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Alrighty, enough of the boring required stuff. We’re going to talk about my favorite part, the complete greenhouse design.
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Most greenhouses are small structures you assemble on a level patch of ground similar to a shed. So why are we talking about a foundation for this greenhouse? Part of the fun of our northern climate is that your foundation needs to extend at least 4 feet below grade to prevent frost creep and freeze/thaw damage.
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Site location is super important for a successful greenhouse and it’s something I didn’t think too much about initially.
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When we first started planning this project we researched a few techniques for constructing the dome hubs. We had several factors to consider when deciding on a building technique such as snow load, which would be best for a permanent structure, ease of construction, and cost.
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Greetings! This is the first post in what I hope is a long running record of my brother and I’s aquaponics project located in northern Michigan.
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