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Growing Your Own (Guest Post) G#42187

By 25 September 2024October 14th, 2024Collaboration, GBE Guest Post, Services
HHP Hockerton Housing Project Inside Indoor Out door Sun Space showing shading and exposed thermal mass, windows to warm cave

Growing Your Own Guest Post

GBE > Advertise > Collaborate > Services > Guest Posts > Greenhouse > G#42187

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GBE Growing Your Own (Guest Post)

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Growing Your Own: The Benefits of Eco-Friendly Greenhouses

  • Eco-friendly greenhouses offer a practical solution for those looking to grow their own plants while making a positive impact on the environment.
  • With a growing awareness of the need for sustainable practices, more people are turning to greenhouses as a way to cultivate their own food, reduce reliance on imported produce, and promote biodiversity in their gardens.
  • Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or a beginner, an eco-friendly greenhouse offers numerous benefits that go beyond traditional growing methods, providing a sustainable and productive way to manage your garden all year round.

How Greenhouses Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

  • One of the primary benefits of using a greenhouse is its potential to reduce your carbon footprint.
  • By growing your own fruits, vegetables, and plants, you decrease the need for store-bought items, many of which are transported long distances.
  • This not only reduces emissions associated with food transportation but also allows you to grow organically, cutting down on the environmental impact of pesticides and fertilizers.
  • Greenhouses enable gardeners to control their growing environment, making it easier to conserve water and energy, two critical factors in sustainable gardening.

The Environmental and Economic Benefits of Greenhouse Gardening

  • Greenhouse gardening is not only better for the planet but can also save you money in the long term.
  • By reducing the need to purchase store-bought produce, you lower your grocery bills, while also avoiding packaging waste.
  • Greenhouses can be designed to collect rainwater and store solar energy, minimising the need for external resources. These features not only reduce energy costs but also contribute to a more self-sufficient lifestyle.
  • Additionally, growing your own food helps you avoid harmful chemicals often found in commercially grown crops, further enhancing your household’s sustainability efforts.

GBE Editorial Comment:

Appropriate Food:

  • Commercial food production is often barmy, lacks joined up thinking, driven by perceived consumer demand, enabled by big retailers high demands and expectations of supply chains that cover the whole globe and often set stupid standards.
  • We should be aiming for a number of issues:
  • Locally produced: avoiding shipping and flying food across the globe
  • Seasonal: Eating foods that can be produced in the local climate and not extended by growing longer seasons growing them in other non-indigenous climates in controlled industrial greenhouses
  • GMO free: Genetically Modified Organisms are the big retailers dream but not the consumers
  • Organic: Chemistry free to be healthy food, not absorbed chemistry
  • Companion planting and predatory pests control
  • Vegetarian/Vegan: because animal meat, fish and birds are consuming food better consumed by people directly; let alone all the husbandry issues.
  • Fresh: Not frozen avoiding the high energy consumption of 24 hour 356 day refrigeration or freezing
  • Wonky, variable size, shape and even bruised vegetables/fruit: natural foods grown in the earth coming out irregular sizes and shapes are perfectly edible just need a little more precise preparation, they should not be landfilled or composted.
  • Less packaging, labelling and less plastics: food grown and consumed by you can avoid all this.
  • Less exported and embodied water, soil and nutrients.
  • Exported flora and fauna with food, potential contamination by invasive species, of the indigenous species gene pool.

Year-Round Growing: Maximising Productivity with a Greenhouse

  • Greenhouses allow for year-round cultivation, which can be particularly beneficial in countries like the UK, where the weather can be unpredictable.
  • With 8 x 10 greenhouses, you gain ample space to experiment with a wide variety of plants, even during colder months. Larger 8 x 10 greenhouses offer more versatility, enabling gardeners to section off areas for different crops, ensuring productivity isn’t limited by external factors like frost or heavy rainfall.
  • These greenhouses create a stable environment, where temperature and humidity can be regulated to suit the needs of your plants.
  • This means you can grow everything from winter vegetables to early spring flowers, ensuring a steady supply of fresh produce throughout the year.

GBE Editorial Comment:

All seasons greenhouses

  • All year all season greenhouses are available from specialists, they adopt energy trapping and saving techniques including: Insulated timber plinths, multilayer polycarbonate glazing and opaque infill.
  • The introduction of a large vessel (waterproof lined planter) of water that acts as a large thermal flywheel, preserving summer and winter solar heating gains to exploit the thermal mass of the water, stabilise the internal temperature over the whole year, increasing the length of the growing season.

Choosing the Right Greenhouse Materials for Sustainability

  • The materials you choose for your greenhouse are crucial in determining its sustainability.
  • Opting for recyclable materials such as aluminium or using timber from certified sustainable sources can significantly lower the environmental impact of your greenhouse.
  • Double-glazed or polycarbonate panels help insulate the structure, keeping the temperature stable without the need for excessive heating.
  • When planning an eco-friendly greenhouse, it’s essential to consider long-lasting materials that won’t need frequent replacement, thus reducing waste.

GBE Editorial Comment:

Aluminium:

  • Aluminium is derived from an abundant mineral, aluminium ore also known as bauxite.
  • Virgin Aluminium has greater impacts than recycled aluminium; choose high recycled content wherever possible.

Impacts include:

  • Land degradation from mining the ore.
  • Virgin aluminium is 20 times higher embodied energy than recycled aluminium.
  • Historically energy for aluminium manufacturer was from renewable hydro-electric power local to bauxite mining, but increasingly from non-renewable fossil-based coal in China and from Oil in the Gulf.
  • High levels of embodied carbon converting abundant bauxite aluminium ore into aluminium, generating hazardous red-mud waste that is stored in settlement ponds behind bunded earth banks, which occasionally burst their banks polluting agricultural land, flooding villages and polluting water courses destroying flora and fauna in the process.
  • Highly polluting PFCs Perfluorocarbon from manufacturing aluminium, the second worse ozone depleting gas occasionally released to atmosphere from pressure relief valves.
  • Pollution from recycling aluminium includes stripping coatings using acid generating hazardous sludge or by melting and burning off plastics coatings generating polluting and even highly toxic smoke particulates released to atmosphere.

Positives:

  • Aluminium is readily segregated from mixed waste and collected for recycling is traded globally and is economically recycled.
  • Aluminium can be manufactured with different properties to suit their application by modifying their recipe to create different aluminium alloys.
  • Recycled aluminium is useful in drinks and food packaging/protection, cladding, proofing membranes and glazing applications but potentially compete for demand in each other’s markets.

Timber:

  • Timber is made from renewable trees harvested from sustainably managed plantations or plundered from ancient forest.
  • In order to be sure timber used in construction or buildings of greenhouses is responsibly sourced, we rely on independently inspected and verified sustainably managed plantations.
  • The pinnacle of certification is FSC Forest Stewardship Council of the plantation and the chain of custody of that timber from plantation to the manufacturer or supplier/retailer or even to the construction site.
  • Trees grow to maturity between 30 and 100 years and can be significantly older, using soil and its minerals, sunlight, wind, carbon dioxide, groundwater, rainwater, soil (and their pollutants including agricultural chemistry, or organic chemistry-free) and mycelium connecting tree roots with each other; interacting with supported and supporting fauna and flora.
  • Trees convert carbon dioxide, water and sunlight via their solar collecting leaves using photosynthesis to make biogenic carbon tree fibres and export oxygen as a waste product.
  • Absorbing carbon dioxide to make biogenic carbon is also known as carbon sequestration and it is beneficial to the planet when we currently have an excess carbon dioxide crisis to address.
  • The oxygen created as a waste product is useful to life of fauna and humans living in their vicinity and to global atmosphere as a whole.
  • Using timber as a building material where the sequestered biogenic carbon is stored in the building or greenhouse for the first use, is a robust environmental solution.
  • If at the end of the first use the timber is in good condition it can be reclaimed and reused in a second location or second construction.
  • Different timber species have different durability’s and depending upon their application and exposure to degrading conditions like weather, ground contact, condensation, mould and infestation this may be as short as 5 to 25 years in hostile conditions to many hundreds of years in internal conditions.
  • Hardwoods tend to be more durable that softwoods although there is an overlap with some perishable hardwoods and durable softwoods.
  • Perishable species can have their durability increased by use of preservative treatments (hazardous chemistry intensive), heat process (energy intensive), low impact (chemistry process).
  • Materials choices and detailing for durability can enhance the life expectancy of timber, whilst bad detailing can foreshorten it.

Glazing:

  • Greenhouse glazing has to perform a number of issues:
  • Safety glazing can resist impacts by birds animals and people in the vertical and sloping plane and doors in particular.
  • Overhead sloping glazing must also be secure in the glazing framing and in the event of glass failure must remain secure not falling down as shards putting lives at risk.
  • Singe glazing is commonplace but will offer wind and weather resistance and offer a degree of warming permitting solar radiant heat entering trapping the heat, warming the interior until the heat leaves by conductivity through the single glazing.
  • As the winter sets in some users will add heaters to protect some plants or prolong the growing season.
  • Double glazing will offer a level of thermal comfort over single glazing keeping the space warmer for longer,
  • Heavy overhead double glazing can become challenging.
  • Multi-wall polycarbonate glazing can be transparent, translucent, tinted or opaque, and have specific solar shading (bouncing light/heat off), solar gain (letting light and heat in) thermal resistance (resisting heat escaping outwards) and low emissivity (bouncing heat back in) properties; they are also lightweight compared to glass and do not shatter like glass.

Ventilation v overheating:

  • The Victorian taught us all we need to know about greenhouses, they understood about trapped solar gains heating and ventilation cooling
  • For optimising growing potential they knew ventilation needs to be made up of two parts low level vertical vents at perimeter and high-level sloping vents at ridge, without these there is high risk of overheating.

Irrigation:

  • Irrigation is essential when greenhouses are kept hot and moisture in soil and plants will evaporate off drying the soil and stifling plant growth
  • Planting succulents that hold water in their fibres can resist dry atmospheres.

Drought Tolerance:

  • In the event a greenhouse is not irrigated then plants indigenous to desert climate that are drought tolerant can be grown.
  • Eden Project is South West of England has 2 biomes reflecting 2 completely different climates, containing completely different plants to suit.

Growing Organic: Tips for a Sustainable Greenhouse Garden

  • Growing organically is central to maintaining an eco-friendly greenhouse.
  • Avoiding chemical pesticides and fertilizers is key, as they can harm local ecosystems and reduce soil fertility over time.
  • Instead, focus on natural composts, mulches, and organic pest control methods.
  • Companion planting, which involves growing plants together that benefit each other, is an effective way to improve soil health and deter pests naturally.
  • Additionally, crop rotation is essential in greenhouse gardening, as it helps prevent soil depletion and reduces the risk of disease.
  • By cultivating a balanced ecosystem within your greenhouse, you create a more sustainable and productive gardening space.

GBE Editorial Comment:
Composts:

  • WRAP Waste Resource Action Programme made big efforts to get waste segregated to enable making of compost free of pollutants
  • WRAP developed a PAS standard for composting and soil improvement.
  • Making good use of food and garden green waste (avoiding meat, fish, etc. in domestic composting)

Bioremediation

  • Soils, sub soils and top soil can be cleaned of pollutants by planting corresponding plant species to absorb the pollutants into the plant fibres.
  • Bioremediation can take a number of seasons but with land banking by speculative housing developers provides the time to do this.
  • Surface water, water courses and water bodies bottom soils can be cleaned of pollutants by releasing corresponding bacteria or plant species to consume the pollutants or absorb the pollutants into the plant fibres.
  • Hemp is one of many plants that will absorb pollutants and leave land in a better condition that it was found in.

Sophie James

  • GBE Editorial Content Writer

© GBE GBC GRC GIC GGC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ******
25th September 2024 – 14th October 2024

Images:

HHP Hockerton Housing Project Inside Indoor Out door Sun Space showing shading and exposed thermal mass, windows to warm cave

Building Research Establishment Integer House Sun Space gable vents

GBE CPD B12 SunSpace WinterGarden Conservatory CIOB 2019 S1 PNG

Outdoor Indoor living Newark Nottinghamshire Hocketon Housing Project Natural Fishing swimming and leisure ponds gardens, conservatory and home

© GBE GBC GRC GIC GGC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ******
25th September 2024 – 4th October 2024

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© GBE GBC GRC GIC GGC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ******
25th September 2024 – 4th October 2024

Growing Your Own (Guest Post) G#42187 End.

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