High Tunnel 2024 – 2 – Low tunnel and heat exchanger

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Happy growing!

More Headway being made in this High tunnel today we’re focusing on setting in the infrastructure for heat exchanger this is a perforated 6-in pipe it Mak sense as we go along but it’s half buried and will be uh associated with the low tunnel here we’re using wood

Chips as a really fast way to bury the pipe in the high tunnel you can see some bricks temporarily hold it down and the wood chips start to hide it and the more material we put on top the more heat can go through it and Bank into the system

It’s a pretty straightforward process we can leave the pipe in maybe for a long time we’ll see uh opportunity here to harvest a bunch of perennial kale thought we’d go through and trim them back so we can reclaim some of the walkways and tidy things up and get some propagation

Material while we’re at it in the process of doing that we ended up with a whole lot of diverse uh material to work with for propagation and eating here Juan is doing Leaf area reduction plucking off the older leaves we’ll send those to the hens in a little

Bit a beautiful bowl of greens for us to eat they cook up kind of like kale or collared and then these cuting which can go into soil to root back in the high tunnel we’re going to work on the southern end of this High tunnel as well well to have a nice seed

Starting area as time allows some of the work today is going to be going through the compost heating pile from last year’s experiments so we’ll pull the coarsest material off and get that into the walkways and start finding the interior we found that there was a huge

Amount of beautiful uh compost that was really appropriate for mulch quick shout out to some gloves that we’ve been using this winter um a friend my my friend Margaret turned us on to these worth checking out if you’re interested the quality of the compost was really nice

After a year of resting we didn’t really water it that much but I think there was enough organic matter that the life just did what it needed to do we did some very informal sifting to get some of the coarses stuff out which made perfect sense for the walkways and then a

Somewhat sifted compost to go around figs and rosemaries little lady Zelda came out to join us this is one of of the first brightest days of the year for her so she liked it but it was a little much and Juan came up with a really nice solution and she liked

It little bit of sun a little bit of shade but she can be with us hanging out hey Donnie so the pipe is now more or less buried enough that hot air siphoned off the low tunnel can be stored in the walkway doing some work on the southern side

To create a level space to flood irrigate we’ll come back to that later on once we got into the heart of this old compost pile we realized we could just use a shovel to harvest at scale we got about 40 buckets or so of worthwhile compost to mulch and feed some of the

Perennial elements in the system here onean is test fitting a 4in uh blower fan this is a 12vt DC blower that will fit onto the perforated pipe to siphon off hot air from the space once it’s covered you can see the simple solar panel will drive that directly and the

Fit is reasonable enough we’ll do a test run here just to make sure even without a ideal Sun angle it can still operate just as much as it needs to then we went through and wrapped it with Greenhouse poly so that it didn’t leak air while it’s in up you you know

Up above ground and then as soon as it transitions to below wood chips it has the perforation so it can exchange temperature and also gases and that’ll send to the far end of the high tunnel simple sheet of used Greenhouse poly covers the whole thing and as soon as

The sun comes out in the morning and it’s hot enough to start uh increasing the heat in there the fan can take it and stored in the earth below Sasha snuck in on the back end there to get a salad ready for lunch we’ve been interacting with chickweed as

A key part of our early spring diet for years we adore eating it just the super greens a lot of times it’s the quote unquote weeds that turn out to be the most valuable Foods in our life so we’ll have chickweed as our salads for the

Next month or so while our annuals get up to speed that we care about beyond that Zelda will be eaten that in no time so got a very simple screen for heat accumulation on the south side we’ll explore that in more detail soon and the low tunnel poly is established with heat

Being drawn off of that space and stored into the floor for overnight use