Скачать или смотреть Is Your Greenhouse Broken - Passive Solar in Latvia?

Our winters here in Latvia are very cold, and our greenhouse just doesn't work for us, as it stands. We need to safely grow more warm loving crops sooner in the year but with only about 3 months of frost free night temperatures it's very difficult. The way greenhouses are currently designed doesn't make any sense, they are essentially broken.

If like us, here in Latvia, you’re way up in the northern hemisphere around 58 deg north to be exact then even on the longest day of the year the sun only gets 55deg above horizon and whilst that might feel like overhead, it’s not and because of that the sun only shines one side on i.e from the south, it’s why people in suburbia want a south facing garden because the sun shines from the south as it travels from the east to the west during the day. So why do greenhouses have 4 sides of glass, or plastic if the sun only shines on one side? Well one answer might simply be for convenience so it doesn’t matter what way round you want to or indeed need to plonk your greenhouse down in your garden, let’s face it for many households a perfect south facing garden isn’t an option and we tend to place our greenhouses where it suits us rather than where it’s most effective.

Now this great benefit of convenience is also the greatest weakness of the greenhouse that is if you’re serious about growing for longer than just summer, and so here’s the second big problem. When the sun goes down your heat source disappears and suddenly your wonderful heat capturing device stops working and lets it all the heat out again and as the year goes on the sun spends less time in the sky and so that problem gets worse and worse, especially when the frosts arrive.

I know not everyone has to face the kind of temperatures that we do here in Latvia but let’s look at our temps across an annual basis and what we can or can’t do with our current greenhouse setup.

In 2018 we left the UK to come to Gita’s family homestead here in north Latvia, not far from the Estonian border and now we live somewhere nowhere in the middle of a forest in a house built by Gita’s grandfather. We’re videoing our journey and trying to give you some insights into how we’re living here.

Well there’s something called a passive solar greenhouse which is rapidly gaining attention. They can come in many different shapes and sizes but here’s how a typical one looks like. It’s nothing particularly new, well passive solar isn’t, even the romans were experimenting with south facing glass buildings but for small to medium growers like us using, storing and distributing passive energy has never really been used, until now that is. And here’s the thing, building a passive solar greenhouse shouldn’t really cost much more than our polycarbonate tunnel greenhouse. It’s just a different approach and the application of some sciencey geeky stuff but here’s essentially how it works in this video

You can also find us on Instagram where we post different and more regular updates:   / baltichomesteaders