The Hydroponic Hot House: Low-Cost, High-Yield Greenhouse Gardening PDF
Preview The Hydroponic Hot House: Low-Cost, High-Yield Greenhouse Gardening
s einltnieegeinaaemaer nt Th Hydroponic Hot House Low-Cost, High-Yield Greenhouse Gardening | James B. DeKorne Loompanics Unlimited Port Townsend, Washington rs oy This book is sold for information purposes only. Neither the author nor the publisher will be held accountable for the use or misuse of the information contained in this book. The Hydroponic Hot House: Low-Cost, High-Yield Greenhouse Gardening © 1992 by James B. DeKorne All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in any form whatsoever without the prior written consent of the publisher. Reviews may quote brief passages without the written consent of the publisher as long as proper credit is given. Some of the information in this book has been compiled and updated from articles originally written by the author in various issues of The Mother Earth News, and in two chapters in The Solar Greenhouse Book, Rodale Press, 1978. Published by: Loompanics Unlimited P.O. Box 1197 Port Townsend, WA 98368 Loompanics Unlimited is a division of Loompanics Enterprises, Inc. Front cover photo by James B. DeKorne. Back cover photo by John McKelvey. Unless otherwise noted, all photos courtesy of James B. DeKorne. Illustrations by Barbara Williams ISBN 1-55950-079-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-Pending Contents 1. Author’s Confession and Introduction ................. ] Pee SURNAMME S ERE ee Glee eas. 20k es Asn, ue ee 13 3. The Attached Solar Greenhouse. ....6.0. 0.05.06 .050 0: fas! 4. Alternative Sources of Petey ics 53 cessive dhe hewcwre 33 S. Greenhouse Temperature Controliec?. 23 15sec texts 41 Es BREN BE9 9 Jia ce recip eee a Po a a) eg Be ed Bors 4 ES ae, Se ae Pe eee a 73 Sea ETI. oe, eu ed hE Seatiess sles as saaheietasies 87 SaGreenhouse*Manasement: 0.16AS2I 6. 127 TUE EsSENeA RAMUION Se RST ee rere rae Cee cee vee tees e 143 DNR i Eh a ga coWs md pm Aang OP 151 12. Afterword — Back to the Future ................... 169 RI RIEEE CMI IS FO, Ie he PPT it ie nck cece eseureies 175 Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/hydroponichothou0000deko Author's Confession and Introduction 1 Author’s Confession and Introduction Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. — Niels Bohr This book, The Hydroponic Hot House, is a completely revised and updated rendition of The Survival Greenhouse, which was first published in 1975 by the Walden Foundation. A second edition was printed by Peace Press in 1978 — it differed from the initial version only by the addition of a Table of Contents and Index. The volume in your hands has been sig- nificantly changed from the first two. 2 Hydroponic Hot House The original book did quite well, considering its counter- culture origins and the fact that the only advertising consisted of some favorable reviews in the alternative press. I suspect that the title had something to do with its success: the word “Sur- vival” has connotations which evoke an anxiety in many of us that the established world order is not stable enough to rely upon for our basic sustenance. The concepts behind the original book were conceived, re- searched and written up in a climate of anxious expectation that “civilization as we know it” was about to disintegrate. The consequences of the Vietnam war, Watergate and the Arab Oil Embargo, plus increasing economic instability and a terrible sense of impending ecological disaster all seemed to be con- verging somewhere just over the horizon. One did not have to look too far in those days to find some version of a doomsday “scenario” predicting utter catastrophe within only a few years. The famous Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth (1972), had a great deal of influence on many people’s thinking, including my own. The three conclusions outlined in the intro- duction to that book were a compelling demand for action — or so it seemed at the time. Here’s the first one: 1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. The dry understatement of the last sentence only served to inflame my imagination as to what might be expected when this “probable result” came about, particularly when augmented by less conservatively worded images, such as this one from Dr. Paul Ehrlich: Author's Confession and Introduction 3 Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. More than three and a half billion people already populate our moribund globe, and about half of them are hungry. Some 10 to 20 million will starve to death this year... (By 1975) some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980’s. — Paul Ehrlich, “Eco-Catastrophe!,” Ramparts, Sept., 1969 If this was what was waiting for us over the near horizon, then obviously it was time for concerned citizens to do something about it. Perhaps things weren’t totally hopeless. The Club of Rome’s second conclusion optimistically suggested that a kind of utopia was even attainable: 2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential. For a utopian like myself, weaned on Sixties activism and imbued with the idealist philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau, such an agenda was a marvelous new challenge. Certainly The Limits to Growth left no doubt about the urgent need for some kind of immediate action in its third and final conclusion: 3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second out- come rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success. So in the best traditions of liberal, world-saving optimism coupled with Thoreauvian self-reliance, I began working on it 4 Hydroponic Hot House — and eventually evolved the idea of a self-sustaining green- house, a mini “eco-system” that could be used by anyone seeking a measure of self-sufficiency and freedom from the (as I wrote in the introduction to the first edition) “corporate whims of the marketplace.” I hasten to add that I make no claims for having “invented” any of these concepts — they were in the air in those days, and many individuals and groups were developing their own versions of them. The New Alchemy Institute, for example, was working along the same lines, and I was greatly influenced by their ideas — particularly in the field of aqua- culture. In looking-through old notebooks while revising this book I found a mimeographed hand-out dating from the mid-seventies. It serves as well as anything to reveal my original beliefs, mind- set, and the concepts that evolved out of them. I beg the reader’s indulgence with my “facts:” A Brief Description of the Eco-System Greenhouse Three Facts: 1. Modern agriculture has become totally dependent upon a rapidly dwindling supply of fossil fuels at a time that man- kind is experiencing the first stages of a world-wide famine. 2. Exacerbated by an extremely unstable energy and eco- nomic situation, the effects of this famine will soon begin to be felt in the United States. 3. Since they do not raise it themselves, few people have any control whatsoever over the source of their food. Neither have they much control over the money they need to pur- chase this food. These conditions suggest that those people who can grow most or all of their own sustenance will be the ones best able to care for themselves during the times ahead. The eco-system
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