AnnaK Simmonds

Hi William. Thanks for the reply. A deer shed is a signal of brutal animal treatment to be honest. It’s a dark shed where farmed deer were herded in to with internal sorting areas. As far as I know the main purpose other than drenching etc was to remove the deer velvet.

When I see these sheds it signals that there have been a lot of terrified animals through the doors.

This is actually one of the main reasons I want to turn the building into something positive. A ‘DEER’ shed into a DEAR shed :-). I’m already planning the sign.

Looking for info from those experienced in Greenhouse heating….and general brain storming for greenhouse design.

Hi all,

We have a large deer shed here which has been left empty except for the starling community housing for the last 25 years.

We’re finally at the point where we are ready to start its conversion to a tall greenhouse. It’s a significant project and we want to do it once, properly.

It gets cold here. The sun is low. We aren’t aiming to heat the space consistently during the winter, but mitigate frost damage on our frost sensitive trees during the worst of it. I like the idea of a pizza oven-to encourage us in to the space more often. But it could be a rocket mass heater. Or just an old pot belly stove (I have one I’ve been dragging around for years). We have lots of firewood trees to coppice. Does anyone have any experience with these types of decisions? I’d
love to hear from the community on these issues.

Our semi formed plan -

* pour a concrete nib wall about 1200m around the base, leaving the lower planks and using the higher planks as boxing.  

* replace the tin on the north, east and west walls with twin walled polycarbonate.

* insulate the south wall.

* the roof was replaced with good quality colour steel recently (before our time) so we’re planning to hold off on replacing that in the hope that there will be enough light with the tall walls and lower sun during the winter.

* The deer shed is in the area of the property that we have recently planted with fruit and nut trees and are now staring on the understory plantings. Our 6 chickens also free range in the area.

* There is a significant shed next door which was once a hangar for the previous owners plane. It now holds a small climbing wall, a dart board and lots of drying garlic. I have hopes of setting up a pub with no money in the future to create and build on connections within our local community.

Extra background for context:

My man and I bought the land on the way to Milford Sound just outside Te Anau, South Island of New Zealand in Feb ‘22. It has great infrastructure (an old government 70acre deer block) three ponds and some decent areas of mature natives. But almost no food except weak pasture for grazing animals. We’ve been chipping away planting food forests with the aim of pro-social prepping and learning to grow as many diverse crops for both humans and the more than humans with as little external inputs as possible. I am a Soil nerd interested in building ecological connections. In a nutshell my aim is to promote diverse thriving ecological systems

Hi, I spray compost extracts (no brew time, just extracted via mixing in a concrete mixer and good water, then strained through similar equipment to gold sluicing into a big tub). Then I use a submersible pump to transfer into a tank with a recirculating motor and spray kit.

The main thing Elaine teaches is that you don’t want ‘walls’ in the design that the bugs will hit at pace and burst open. This will mean you’ve both lost viability in the organisms you are applying and changed the C:N ratios towards more free nitrogen.

I use the static aerobic composting system Johnson-Su to make our compost as we are working on grapevines and orchards mostly and want high fungal content. Here’s a recipe for a seed slurry using that compost method. https://youtu.be/tunH4ETViQo?si=zamlRMLx-lG7xGSC

Just want to pipe in and say these threads are the best concise resources on the net I’ve found. Thankyou so much from New Zealand! We’re reading here too.

Thankyou! I’m going to need a mortgage to get them to New Zealand! But thanks very much for the reply. Earth blessings to you.

Bryant RedHawk wrote:

Even then you are well advised to purchase and use the several huge volumes of Microbiology identifier text books, none of which are under 75 dollars.

Link to List of Bryant RedHawk's Epic Soil Series Threads

Thankyou so much for your fabulous posts. I devour them! There is so much practical clear advice in them for those of us beginning our journeys into this very important facet of food and planetary health.

I’m an ex microbiology technician in the food and pharma industries and have recently bought a good quality microscope for tea and soil analysis. I’m having trouble working out which textbooks would be best suited to this work as far as help with improving id goes. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for us newbies?

R. Steele wrote:Hello!

I'd love to try and help, but what do you mean by "tweek to our own footprint size"?

Hi, ha ha, sorry, terminology probably lost in translation. I mean are there software programs  out there with plans that will adjust the size of the components based upon the size of our footprint. Rather than us having to draw it up in sketchup for example? We are still undecided about the precise size yet and we got to wondering if there is such a thing.

It’s not a going to be big - ever so slightly dug in (we had hoped to have it sunk a bit but the boys hit a schist seam and gave up). Probably max 7m by 7m. We have extremely hot dry summers and winters which while getting warmer generally get down to -5c for a week or so most years.

Kia Ora from New Zealand. Im a long time lurker first time poster here. Having finished our small house following permaculture design principles as much as possible, we are finally in a position to get a greenhouse going in a zone 9 area in New Zealand. I love the ideas I’m getting from this forum and the riffing off them we do ourselves. I’m interested to know if there are plans we could buy that we can easily tweak to our own footprint size? Any recommendations? Thanks in advance for your help!