It rained last night! In a dry climate, rainwater is very precious. We want to preserve it as much as we can. Rainwater harvesting for use in the garden helps us to use water that would otherwise go to waste. Plants prefer to be watered with stagnant water that had the chance to warm up. Having ...
Building
Four Season Greenhouse/Growing Room Review
8 years have passed since we started our adventure of building a four-season greenhouse/growing room at the back of our garage, and it's time for an honest review. If you are new here, welcome! Northern Homestead is in Alberta Canada, growing zone 3, 51 latitude parallel north. The ...
Row cover tunnel
A row cover tunnel is a simple way to extend the growing season and protect plants from cold, wind, hail, insects, wildlife, and more. Since there are many uses for a row cover tunnel in the garden, there are also many different materials to use and ways to do it. In this blog ...
N.F.T. Downspout Hydroponics Setup
We have been growing food in the N.F.T. Downspout hydroponics now for a few years. It is our preferred choice for indoor gardening. In this post, we are showing you how to set up a simple NFT downspout Hydroponics system. There are different types of hydroponic systems: Water Culture, Ebb ...
Preventing birds from flying into windows
We love our indoor window garden, and grow lots of food in there every winter. Big windows are great, and we encourage having and using them for edible window gardens. However, it has one negative effect. The big windows reflect the light and birds can't see them. We had to come up with a solution ...
How to Create a New Garden Bed
Not even 100 years ago every family had a garden. Children learned from their parents and every house came with a more or less established garden. That has changed, but more and more people want to go back to gardening, and growing theyr own food. Gardens are rewarding and fun. How to create a new ...
Covering the GeoDome Greenhouse
The covering of the geodome greenhouse makes all the difference in how much protection you will have. A single layer of greenhouse plastic poly keeps a greenhouse around 4 degrees warmer at night than the outside temperature. Adding another layer of plastic filled with air in between the two would ...
NFT downspout Hydroponics system upgrade
Nutrient Film Technique (N.F.T.) Downspout Hydroponics is an exceptionally simple hydroponics setup. Last winter we built a NFT downspout Hydroponics system to grow lettuce indoors all throughout the winter. We share a how-to here. We are very pleased how the system works, of all the other ...
High Pressure Aeroponics Guide
Recently we described our NFT downspout hydroponics system which you can read about here. Now imagine having a large box for the plant's roots that are now suspended in the air, and the nutrient-rich water solution is being sprayed onto the roots in a form of a fine mist. What you will get is called ...
How to Build a Geodesic Dome Greenhouse Version 2
We built our second geodesic dome slightly different from our first one several years ago. In this article, we share how to build a geodesic dome greenhouse version 2. You can read all about version 1 in How to Build a GeoDome Greenhouse. Why did we use a different building method? A couple of ...
