Alexander Fraley

I would like to add two pecan trees to my yard, but don't have a lot of room. It looks like Kanza and Pawnee will pollinate one another, is this correct? I've seen some conflicting information about the size of Pawnee as well, some places saying it stays under 30ft, but other say it gets up to 75ft like most pecans. I can have one large tree but not two.

So as while breaking ground on my greenhouse continues to be delayed I have even more time to stew about what techniques I'll be implementing. For reference, I'm in zone 7 and the greenhouse will be 150sqft and 14ft tall, growing tropical food producing plants.

So biocontrol of pests. It seems to me the issue is that after the pest is eliminated, then your predatory insects are out of food. I'm wondering in the closed system of a greenhouse if it's possible to assemble a balance of predators like in the wild. So I expect to have populations of lacewings and ladybugs preying on the various smaller pests as well as adult black soldier flies emerging from the compost and I'm sure stinkbugs wandering in for warmth in the fall. So could these support larger predators like spiders and praying mantis?

My thinking is the larger predators would keep the intermediate predators under control so they don't overpopulate.
Has anyone heard of or tried anything like this?
Any other suggestions for the system?

So I had been thinking I would locate the compost on the south side of the greenhouse so it would receive the most radiation and keep moving along efficiently. But is this really necessary? Assuming the greenhouse is insulated enough to keep the plants happy through the winter, shouldn't that also be enough to keep the compost from shutting down even without solar exposer? It would be better space utility to locate the compost on the north side and free up more growing space on the south side. I'm in US zone 7 and the north wall will be insulated.

I'm planning on more of a small pond in my greenhouse,but the principle is the same. Water has more than double the thermal mass capacity of stone or soil, so I'll be utilizing my body of water to regulate the temperature of the greenhouse.

Thanks Krisz, that was really neat video and has a number of conceptual overlaps with my design. The key difference is that I'll be maintaining a smaller compost inside my greenhouse. He's losing a lot of heat to the outdoors, by giving up a few square feet, I can truly passively harness a much larger amount of heat. And yes my foundation will be insulated so that the thermal mass of the floor of my compost won't dissipate the heat into the surrounding soil.

Thanks everyone. For a fuller picture, I'm hoping to use this as a supplemental heating strategy in the winter for the greenhouse I will be building. So ~18 days bacterial hot decomposition, and spread that material through out the greenhouse for the fungi to take over. And then start a new round of hot composting.

So there are some really great instructions online about this fast composting method, including various materials that can be used for your green and brown matter.

I've started to put my daily coffee grounds in a five gallon bucket of water instead of my regular compost bin. I also have a large willow oak tree that drops lots of leaves in the fall.

So for my 25:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio I'm thinking of primarily using these small leaves and this coffee liquid, plus some microbial innoculent from the regular compost. Is there any reason that this rather undiversified combo would not work for this method? Has anyone tried anything similar?

Thanks R Scott, that's great info. My yard has a slight slope down to a creek about 30ft from where the greenhouse will be. I was only planning on digging down 2ft, so the drain would be like 2.5ft below the surface (our frost line is 18 inch s FYI). The location used to be a child's play area and I'm bagging up all the shredded tires now. I'm hoping that by going two feet down I can remove all the contaminated soil and be able to plant directly into the ground, but I'll have the soil tested to be safe.

I think the walipini style may be beneficial to my greenhouse but I have concerns about flooding. What preventative designs are there to control too much water? Would a drain to the outside let in cold winter air? I am in US zone 7.

I just got a shipment of Passiflora seeds from https://www.rarexoticseeds.com/en/, I believe they're based out of Montreal. They have both Caerulea (blue passionflower) and Incarnata (Maypop). These are the two most common cold hardy species.

I'm not sure if either will be able to tolerate Canada's  winters, but another option that may be a little harder to find is Passiflora colvillii. It is a hybrid between incarnata and caerulea and I've seen that its roots can withstand -20F (-28C).