Mapping the quonset greenhouse to the self-watering container gardening system

Prev    Next  [ food subseries , off-the-grid main series ]

Spent a little time making a diagram of the floor layout of the quonset with water tanks on each side fed by a rainwater gutter system.  The gutter will be closed on each end, but will have a hose connector that runs through the side of the gutter that will drain it into the tanks inside the quonset.  There will be a float system that will stop the drainage if the inner tanks become full.  Water will just overfill the gutters and spill outside.

tanks should handle up to 2 inches of rain at a time.

It would be a mistake to assume that it doesn't rain that much out there.  The wet season can be rainy enough to fill up the tanks and then some.  I'd like to over-engineer the capacity of the tanks, but that might be hard.  There is some risk here that a really rainy stretch will lose some rain water.

The estimate at this time is that 5 five gallon buckets can be on each side.  According to the videos, up to 20 plants can grow in each bucket.  That's 200 plants that can be grown at one time in this little greenhouse.  If you double up, then it's 400.  Triple it, and it's 600.  Since I have no experience with this, I have no idea of what the capacity would be.  As for now, 200 sounds like an awful lot of plants.  With good yields, I could have plenty of produce to eat.

The buckets will sit on the floor of the water tanks inside.  The bucket inside the bucket will have to raised to the height that the water will get, meaning about 4 inches.  That's solved by adding a brick or something to the inside of the bucket.  The second bucket sits on top of the brick some 4 inches higher that the first bucket, which sits on the floor.

There's no need for plumbing as the buckets will just fill up naturally from the tanks as they fill.  The only plumbing is for the hoses and floats (connected to the gutters) to insure that the tanks don't overfill inside the quonset when it rains too much.

As mentioned in a prior post, the tanks will be made of concrete cloth.  May use some stucco to seal up any holes that be necessary for making attachments to the 2x4's that make up the walls of the tanks.  The tanks will only be 4 inches deep, but are 2 feet wide by 8 feet long.  Run the numbers and you get about 40 gallons of water that can be stored in each side.

Naturally, there needs to be a walkway so that a person can service the greenhouse without having to wade into the water.  Incidentally, the water may need to be covered somehow so that algae doesn't grow inside the tanks.  That wouldn't be good.

I don't anticipate this to be a costly design nor a difficult design to implement.  Those could be famous last words there, kemosabe.