Thursday 18 November 2010

This is a design I sort of threw together one afternoon thinking about the absolute easiest and cheapest way to make a greenhouse, ideally for farming in cities and favella type environments.

It's just three tripods together in a triangle, wrapped in some ultra cheap plastic such as transparent mulch film, which some farmers throw literally kilometres of away each year.


It's arbitrarily scalable, the one pictured would have a 110 m2 footprint, giving about 320 m2 growing area. It'd also tie in well with aquaponics and similar.

I'll have a look at getting a working group together here in Perth, leave most of the work with them while I get on with the solar thing.

It'll largely come down to what land can be found, but as the thing will be somewhat moveable, getting kicked out won't be such a big issue.

Updates on this will appear on http://urbangreenhouse.blogspot.com/

9 comments:

  1. This has real possibilities. At first it seemed to me that one leg of each tripod would be in the interior space, but closer inspection shows me wrong - each leg is on the perimeter. Simple enough to lash the poles together for the tripods, or how about that WikiSeat thing for those with access to welders?

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  2. Tripods are super easy, I've seen some pretty large ones used in tree-sits / occupations lashed up fairly quick.
    The real issue is the plastic, I've been looking into plastic mulch film, which is very cheap, but tends to degrade quickly. I'm going to take a crack at making this back in New Zealand in a month or so, and will see what's cheap and available there.

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  3. Yeah, maybe the welded thingy would be overkill when simple lashing would work.

    I'll be curious to see what you come up with; I'm intrigued by this design. Is the "floor" an equilateral triangle?

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  4. It would be, yes. You could also lay these side to side, and enclose the space between, which would make for some pretty huge growing areas.

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  5. Any updates on this project will be posted to http://urbangreenhouse.blogspot.com , tho over the next month that will be mostly focussed on the results of a non electrical cooling system I'm working on.
    Damn, honestly, so much to do...

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  6. No activity on the greenhouse?

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  7. Definite activity, just not much of it online. I'm waiting on the waterproof paint to dry on the manuka poles for the tripods, all the other materials are in place, including a nice levelled patch of ground.
    I only just got the internet on here (finished the homemade reflector dish bout half an hour ago), so will aim to post a _bunch of media updates to http://urbangreenhouse.blogspot.com soon

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  8. Saw the updates at urban greenhouse! Looks like a beautiful place to experiment with the design. Thanks for sharing your progress.

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  9. Wow! The greenhouse is really starting to take shape.

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