Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Early days yet, but I am thinking of biulding a "glass house".

Given that the area I live in has a lot of gum trees which tend to drop branches I am leaning towards at least having the roof made of poly carbonate.

My main question stems from where I want to put the said "glass house". I will have a couple of gum trees on either side and I was wondering, Does it matter if you get doppled light to said GH? During the summer months there is plenty of light on this area, however given that I'm slightly on a southerly aspect of a hill in winter it does recieve low daylight levels of direct sun.

OK my questions to start,
Is it worth bothering with?
What materials?
How big?

H.

How cold does it get in the 'Hills?
Canberra gets really cold, so it's worthwhile for me, as keeping the heat in keeps plants alive.

(eucalypts can take a fairly savage trimming BTW)

Doesn't get quite as cold as Canberra (though it feels like it sometimes) , and really don't want to "prune" the trees too far as they are the main reason we moved up here.

I'll see if I can get home early enough tomorrow to take a pic of the area I'm thinking about to see if those in the know can advise me as to whetehr it's suitable or not.

H.

Himzol - the glass house can only make things better during winter. It should make it possible to do AP, where as it may not have been before.

Hi Himzol,

the poly carbonate would be the best option, assuming you are getting small branch droppage and not large.

With our heat here (Adelaide side of the hills), we find that the small extractor fan is not quiet enough and usually need to keep the door open mid summer. This in turn defeats having a sterile environment, the white moth seems to love the conditions. So we would probably recommend better air circulation than what we have. Maybe the poly carb roofing with at least one rollup plastic side lined with insect screen or shade cloth.

We currently have a little less than dappled light heading into winter. The Deciduous Council tree which is at the tail end of our greenhouse hasnt started to loose its leaves as yet, so we get more solid shade than prefered. Hopefully not for too much longer. Some of the new lettuce are starting to grow a little too tall due to the lack of more solid light.

!. do you currently grow under the trees (or did I miss that) anything?
2. Is it a windy zone?
3. Poly Carb.
4. Use the rubber washer
5. Sharp pre-drill (avoid spliting ) scew holes into PC
6. Right way up!
my 2c

With regard to the shade aspect, dappled light means you are getting less than full light. So in the winter, things won't be quite as warm as they would be in full light. But it will probably still be enough to run your system as though it were spring/fall

Heck, where I live, few things survive full sun through the summer so dappled shade is nice at least for part of the day.

With reduced light in winter, you will have slower growth and probably be restricted to the more leafy veggies but if the temps are cooler anyway, the fish slow down a bit so having slower production on the veggie side through winter might not be so bad.

As asked before, do you grow much in that location currently? If there is enough light now, then it would probably be worth it. If it's shady enough that a veggie garden couldn't grow there now, adding a green house won't change that.

A glass house in winter is like a ship without a rudder i mean without some sort of heating [sun gas electricity ect] with a glasshouse locked up over night and no heating or heat sink if its 1 deg outside it will be 2 deg inside ,. Granted during the day when the sun is out there will be a big difference

try to see an episode of "It's Not Easy Being Green" first season where they built a greenhouse with a heat sink of crushed glass and a small solar powered pump to pump the hot day air down into the glass for release during the night

http://www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.org/

http://www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.org/faqs.cfm?CFID=1503324&CFTOKEN=71786119#heatsink

Greenhouses (glass houses) are all about thermal mass. You need a material to store all the heat from the day to be released at night.

A whole lot of water works pretty well

Where would an AP'er get a whole lot of water?

here

Thanks for all the advice folks,

I'll try and answer some of the questions raised,

C1 yes the area was used for growing thing but not this season as it wasn't required and I wanted to limit the amount of water I was using.

Jaymie, thanks for the links, I had brief look at work today but didn't really have much time to explore so will be doing that tonight.

The idea is to use this to house my AP system so the thermal mass will be the water in the FT and sump while extending our growing season. Anyway here are a couple of pictures of the site taken fairly late in the day.

The whole idea behing building this here is that where the current AP system and earth garden are will be an extended chook run so both have to move.

So what do people think of the position? It's the area where the green tufft is in the middle of the second picture.

Himzo.

that's a nice steep block, about the same slope as here

I think the photo makes it look worse than it really is.