Guns. Gear. Machines. Medicine. Won’t mean a damn thing if you have nothing to eat. You can stockpile all the food you want, but if you can’t grow it, then the clock immediately starts ticking after the shit hits the fan. Today we’ll be talking about phase one of my plan to never have to go to the grocery store again. Let’s get to it. Alright guys, today’s the day we give you a tour of the Apocalypse greenhouse, also known as a greenhouse. Now if you guys recall, last year we did the complete build out. We show you how we built it.

This is a 50 by 26 greenhouse and I wanted something that was permanent that could resist the winds because it gets crazy windy out here. A standard plastic wrap hoop house is not going to survive at least where we are. So we needed something that was a bit more heavy duty, a steel frame structure. If you’ve witnessed the plow winds around here, on a good day your trampoline is blowing across the fields, right? In the prairies we have to contend with cold weather and we got to contend with wind. So this is going to mitigate those things.

In addition to making a greenhouse, I also wanted a place for us to be able to come and chill. You know, refuge from the elements, refuge from the bugs even. Bugs don’t like it in here except the bees. They love it in here, don’t they? So we have two 3 foot by 50 foot runs. Then we have two 24 foot by 4 foot raised garden beds. And then we have two 12 feet by 4 feet raised garden beds. And then we just have a bunch of buckets and then of course, like I said, we can hang stuff in here.

We have a few fruit trees in the middle. This is the tomato and cucumber section. We have them together for no particular reason, not because they necessarily complement each other. I did this without first getting the advice of the soil scientist, our friend Ashley over at Gardening in Canada. So I’m sure she’s going to have something to say. We got flowers at the ends of every raised garden bed. That’s to attract pollinators. So here we have a variety of different types of tomatoes. We have our beefsteak tomatoes. I love the beefsteak tomatoes. We have some cherry tomatoes that the kids love.

We have some cucumbers that are hopefully going to grow up this trellis like you see here. Those are on both sides. A lot of tomatoes because you can use tomatoes to make salsa. Salsa keeps for a long, long time. In here you can’t see it, but we have some beans that we’ve planted. They’ve yet to sprout. So we’re hoping that once they do, they’re going to use this trellis that we’ve devised here. Here we have some onions, Spanish onions. So we’re going to see how these turn out. Here we have some celery, which basically takes more energy to consume.

But we figured, what the hell? Might as well get something in there that’s nice to munch on, especially seeing as we’re trying to be health conscious. Now, here we have a bit of a herb garden. I don’t even know all the herbs. I didn’t even plant this. Things that we’re going to be able to use to spice up everything else. Variety is the spice of life, and spice is the spice of life. Now, I love my green peppers, my bell peppers, and these things are so expensive at the store. So I went nuts with peppers.

Bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers, all of the peppers in the world. I even planted a pepper called Armageddon. It’s around here somewhere, but it’s supposed to be one of the hottest peppers in the world. Now, over here, these are some garden beds that we’ve yet to plant. We got a few peppers in here, but we’re going to be doing a mixed variety of stuff in here. We’ve yet to decide what we’re going to be using these for. Here, the kids like watermelons. They like cantaloupes. So we have some watermelon and cantaloupes. These things apparently need a lot of space.

So I’m not sure what to expect with these. To be honest, this is something that you typically would grow outside, but because our growing season and the conditions, we’re allocating a whole raised garden bed to try out the melons and the cantaloupes. Over on this end back here, we have some smaller cherry trees, about four feet wide when they’re fully grown, and they’re about 1.5 meters high. This is a great thing to have at the back of the greenhouse because it’s not going to overshadow any of the smaller plants.

And I love cherries. Cherries are amazing. You can do a lot of things with them. And surrounding it, we just have onions because we had a bunch of extra onions. So for this year, knowing that this plant is not going to get that big this year, we figure we put some annuals in and around it. All right, now back here, I know I’ve committed gardening blasphemy. Planting raspberries indoors, what the hell is he thinking? If it turns out that they become too invasive and they take everything over, then we’ll just get rid of them.

But I wanted to see what we could do because I wanted a mixed berry variety in here. Fruits have a lot of calories, so we wanted to go heavy on the fruits. We have some Saskatoon berries. We have some blueberries. And we have a crapload of strawberries because if there’s one thing I can grow very well, it’s strawberries. So we’re going to be doing a whole shwack of strawberries. In fact, we’re probably going to do a double-decker. And strawberries are just great because they’re easy to grow. They produce multiple times a year, even in our climate.

So that’s why I went out and got some more here today, as you can see. We’re hoping that this is just going to become a nice strawberry patch. We also are going to be planting some garlic because apparently you eat a clove of this stuff a day. You’re never going to have heart problems. At least that’s what I hear. We all have something called a cucamelon. Some sort of cross between a cucumber and a watermelon. What mad scientists created such a concoction. Now, we also got some kiwis. And these kiwis requires a male and a female.

So I’m looking forward to seeing if we can grow some kiwis in here. So we have an orchard, but I wanted to experiment to see how well these trees would do in here. We got a lot of height and we got a lot of extra space. We got these wide runs. I may actually auger a hole into here. And it’s at the tail end of the greenhouse. So I don’t have to worry too much about blocking the sunlight from some of the other plants. So here we have a cherry tree, which is doing very well.

And here we have an apricot tree. And as you can see, there’s definitely apricots on there already. Not too many, but there’s some on there, which is very cool to see. It’s not something you see in Saskatchewan that often. This, I believe, is an apple tree. And we do have a few apples coming in, I think. Yeah, we got a couple apples coming in there. Here we have another apricot tree. That one’s looking good. Here we have a, I believe this is an apple tree as well, if I’m not mistaken. Seems to be doing pretty good.

And then we have another apple tree as well. The goal is to try to create as many calories and nutrients as possible. Less so about calories because, of course, we have our staple starchy potatoes out there in the exterior raised garden beds. But that’s one thing we’re looking at. So because the roof covers such a large surface area, we’re going to be trying to harvest that rain. And we’re going to do so with a rain catchment system on the outside. For that, we’re going to be using some eavesdrops, which are going to feed all the rain into water tanks that are going to be positioned at the rear.

And then we’re going to be able to use that water. If there’s ever, you know, a major drought or for whatever reason, our well isn’t working. Or we just want that fresh rainwater. We’re going to be able to put that directly into the plants. Right now I’m using a hose, but eventually we’re going to be doing drip irrigation in here. So we’re going to snake it through all of the raised garden beds and it’s just going to be as simple as flicking a switch. I can’t wait for that. But I got to say, I don’t mind watering.

Watering is fun too, especially watering these idiots. So as you can see, we got about 50 buckets. We’re going to fill them with all different kinds of stuff. Here we got some kale. Let me try a little bit of that. For me, leafy stuff, never been a big leaf eater, but can’t hurt. It’s a nice filler. So you could eat it right off the plant, which is good. Kale apparently is a good antioxidant I hear. Some people like the bitter aftertaste, but the older I get, the more bitter I get. So it doesn’t matter.

The greenhouse is such that it’s lengthwise north to south. So all the plants are going to get nice direct sunlight throughout the entire course of the day. One of the great things about living up here in the north and why greenhouses work almost better in spring and summer is because you get much longer days. Even though it’s May 15th and it’s only, what, like 15 degrees today? It feels like it’s 30 degrees in here. It gets really warm in here. So we need ventilation. We have these automatic windows that are attached to a gas spring that depending on the temperature, the hotter the temperature, the wider the window opens.

If it’s really hot in here, this thing is going to be like at a 90 degree vertical open. This is a three season greenhouse. If we maybe tweak it with insulation a little bit, we might be able to stretch our growing season two months on either end. These are raised garden beds that are built out of cedar wood. With the cedar, it was a hefty investment. All right, so here we are in the greenhouse. We’re building some three foot beds. Go all the way from one side to the other. Then we’re going to have four foot beds.

Then we’re going to have like an open five feet of space to move a wheelbarrow through there or put potted plants or something. Then we’re going to have another four foot bed right here that runs all the way to the end. Then we’re going to have another big three foot bed here and then we might even have some stuff hanging up as well. That’s what’s going on. How’s it going, dog? Working hard? Working hard, boy? What do you think, man? Great work in progress. Yeah. Hoping to get it done today.

This is my slave labor. Child labor laws don’t apply. That’s not what you told me. It took a lot of dirt. We actually have a lot of soil here on the property. We have about 18 inches of topsoil. The problem is scooping out that topsoil without getting the sand underneath and the clay is challenging. We’re in a race against time here. We wanted to get this built out as soon as possible. So we ordered 24 yards of dirt and that was enough to cover our needs. These are not filled up all the way.

Over time, of course, it’s going to build up quite a bit. But it was a lot of work getting the dirt in here. Ideally, if you’re going to build a greenhouse, you should probably build the garden beds first and then build the greenhouse around it. We could have just dug right into the ground. This just allows us to control the environment a lot more by using raised garden beds. And so these are basically three 2x6s stacked on top of one another. Some are more better reinforced than others. I thought I went overkill with some, but you notice that there’s a little bit of a bulge here.

The runs along the sides are basically 50 feet and they’re 3 feet deep. I wanted the ability to reach in. I could have did a 4-foot bed on the sides, but I chose not to just for ergonomics. I’ve learned enough about gardening in the last couple years that I know that half the battle is the harvesting, the maintenance and all of that stuff. I’m just really super excited about this. This was a lot of work, guys, and as many of you know, we’ve been doing this homestead thing for a while.

You know, you reach one plateau and then you want to do something else so you seldom get to just kind of sit and enjoy the fruits of your labor, literally. But I’m hoping I can do that at some point throughout the summer, where we are, if you really want to be self-reliant off-grid, you kind of need a greenhouse. And you want something big because I don’t even think that this is going to be able to produce enough food for the family for a few months of the year, unless we really maximize the use of our space.

So that’s what the goal is going to be. This, when paired with our external raised garden beds for starch, our orchard, and of course whatever sort of grazing animals and chickens we get, the ultimate goal is to be able to create a meal every night that is something that we grew or fed and cultivated ourselves. If we can do that, we should be sitting pretty at the end of the world. Let me know if you guys have any pointers and tips in the comment section below about how I should build up this place, you know, what I should do to maximize yield in a 50 by 25 by 15 foot high steel frame greenhouse.

I’m really looking forward to reading these comments. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. If you enjoyed the video, please share it. Take care. [tr:trw].

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