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KRCC and A Music Company Inc. present
Mose Allison
KRCC presents an evening with
NPR's Scott Simon
You don’t have to spit far these days to hit an urban garden. The trend, says the New York Times in THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE about an Urban Farm in Milwaukee, has everything to do with the recession and the growing awareness of the impact that shipping food long-distance has on our climate and our pocketbooks. Of course, not all of us will be able to feed ourselves with what we grow in our back yards during the lean, mean growing season here in Southern Colorado. But there are ways around it, and John Sondericker has built an inexpensive Geo-Dome greenhouse in hopes of growing enough vegetables to supply his family of 5 for the better part of the year, if not year-round. We visited John and his dome for a brief tutorial on how he did it and how it’s going thus far.
For a more detailed description of how to build your own Geo-Dome Greenhouse, you can follow these links:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
If you know of other urban garden stories we’d love to hear about them. Please leave comments or email us at thebigsomething@krcc.org. If you like this and other stories you’ve seen here, please sign up for our email list in the upper-right-hand corner of this page and encourage your friends to do so as well. You can also click on the “Share This” link below. Thanks! It helps KRCC grow.
Here’s a much easier way to make a “quonset hut” greenhouse:
Buy the longest lathing strips they sell at Home Depot/Lowes (lathing strips are wooden strips about 1/4″ x 1. 1.4″ inches and up to 16 ft, and are/were the skeletons holding up interior plaster walls). Make a straight line of sticks about 2 ft apart, Jamming one end of each stick into the ground. Arch each stick and jam the other end into the ground, making an arched “tunnel of strips. But sheet plastic big enough to cover the tunnel top. Think about wind direction when you orient your tunnel. If you find it’s necessary, cut some wind holes in the plastic. If you want your hut warmer, put moveable plastic flaps over the ends. If you anticipate flying bugs being a problem, buy netting at a fabric store and put moveable netting flaps over the ends. Experiment with how hot it gets it inside. If you want all of the plastic tunnel roof on all the time, staple all of the plastic to the strips (put a scrap of cloth on the outside of the plastic at each staple, to keep the plastic from ripping). If you want to fold all or part of the plastic roof back during the day, figure out a way to do that: lash it down with rope/baling twine etc that you can lash/unlash.or experiment with clothespins (they still sell wooden ones at KMart). I slept in one of these for an entire winter, and it routinely got hot inside (our plastic roof was not moveable).
Comment by Joyce Cheney — July 9, 2009 @ 6:36 am
Dude, don’t make me listen to you chew food on the radio. Gross….
Comment by Eric Whitney — July 9, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
When it is that crisp and fresh it isn’t gross, it is beautiful.
Comment by John Sondericker — July 9, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
I’m really interesting in trying this out, but I don’t have a sheet-metal shop to punch out the connectors for me. Any ideas where I could get them? Or other cheap, easily attainable solutions?
Comment by Julie Evans — July 11, 2009 @ 6:10 am
I think there’s a kit version of this greenhouse available online?
Comment by Marina Eckler — July 11, 2009 @ 12:11 pm
[...] summer, we took you on a tour of a Buckminster Fuller-style geo-dome greenhouse made on the cheap by John Sondericker in his back yar…. We went back this summer to see how it went last summer and what modifications had to be made and [...]
Pingback by The Big Something» DIY Geo-Dome Greenhouse, Year 2 — August 24, 2010 @ 7:01 am
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