How an AMISH Greenhouse Holds the Day's Heat Through the Night

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a frost coming and you have been out there with a bedsheet. And you are standing in a greenhouse that was ninety degrees at two o'clock with the door propped open because it was too hot to work in, knowing that by four in the morning everything inside will be the same temperature as the yard. Your greenhouse is not short of heat. It made far more today than it needed, and you threw most of it out of the vents. The trouble is it has nothing in it to hold any of that until dark. It is a box of glass with air in it, and air holds almost nothing. A greenhouse does not want a stove. It wants something heavy to remember the day. My grandmother taught me this at dawn after a hard frost, when I was eleven and certain we would lose everything. She had me out there before it was light. The grass was white and there were ferns of ice across the inside of the lower panes. She told me to put my hand flat on the glass, and it was so cold it hurt. Then to hold it in the air in the middle of the house, which was cold but not the same. Then to push it down into the soil of the bed as deep as I could get it. It was warm. Not cool. Warm, with ice on the inside of the glass eighteen inches away. Then she asked where that warmth had come from, since nothing in that house had burned all night. What we go through: Why air holds almost no heat at all, and why that explains the cliff edge at dusk Why water beats everything else you can lay hands on, pound for pound Why mass also stops the afternoon from cooking your plants, which may matter more than the night Barrels of water, how many, where to stand them and why dark paint Stone, brick and block under the benches, and why a soil floor beats a boarded one The hotbed, and how market gardeners grew salad through winter with no heat at all Insulating the north wall, which gives you nothing and costs you all night Shutting the vents at dusk rather than at bedtime A cover over the beds inside the greenhouse, and why it must sit clear of the leaves Watering in the morning rather than the evening, and why wet soil is thermal mass On the sand battery videos going round: those are real and they work. But look at what they are doing, which is running an electric element off panels to drive sand to four hundred degrees, something sand can do and water cannot because water boils. If you have panels and an element, sand is right. If you have no power out there, water holds about five times what sand does per pound and the sun will not drive either to four hundred degrees through glass. The plain limits. This moderates, it does not make summer. What it buys is a few degrees at the cold end and a few weeks at each end of the season, which is the difference between a house that freezes solid and one that does not. It will not save tomatoes and peppers through a deep freeze, and the right answer there is to stop growing them in November. What it will carry is the hardy things: spinach, kale, hardy lettuce, leeks, carrots left in the ground, cabbage. Tomorrow, go out before it is properly light after a cold night. Hand flat on the glass. Then in the air in the middle. Then pushed down into the soil of the bed. Three temperatures, three inches apart. Tell me in the comments what the difference was between the air and the soil. And if you are new here, tell me what you are trying to carry through the winter. Next time we go back to the beginning of it, because the best thing you will put in that greenhouse next year is seed you saved yourself. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Greenhouse #ThermalMass #WinterGardening #SandBattery #OffGrid #Hotbed #ColdFrame #Gardening #Homesteading #OldWays #SelfReliance #GrowYourOwn #Frost #SeasonExtension