We started with growing a four-season garden before passive solar greenhouses for year-round growing became popular. Instead, we converted part of an old garage into a food production place and experimented with growing food year-round. Here is an honest 8 years of year-round growing in zone 3 ...
Garage - Greenhouse
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 ...
Winter Solstice 2021 Indoor Garden Update
It is December 21, 2021 today. It being the shortest day of the year, we thought it was a good time for an indoor garden update. Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere is the beginning of winter, not sure what we had the last month though ;), and it is also the beginning of longer and brighter ...
Growing an indoor edible garden in soil
In this post, we talk about growing an indoor edible garden in soil. In our outdoor garden, growing in good organic soil is our very first choice. In an indoor garden, however, it is not our first choice. Why is that? Success and failure in growing great plants depend mostly on the ...
Where does our Homegrown Food come from in the Winter
Where does our homegrown food come from in the winter? As you know we grow a garden year-round, so do we have a greenhouse big enough and suitable to grow what we eat during the winter months? These are good questions, let's take a closer look. The year-round garden Growing food year-round ...
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 ...
Why we heat the indoor garden with electricity
Every so often the question comes up on how we heat our indoor garden/greenhouse or why we heat the indoor garden with electricity. For those that don't know we are in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. It is cold here. We use our indoor growing room year-round. In the ...
Indoor Garden Update Fall/Winter 2019
In the summer of 2014, we started the adventure of converting an old garage into a food production place. As you will see in this indoor garden update fall/winter 2019, we have come a long way. The story When we first started we had big plans and zero experience in indoor gardening especially in ...
2 Top Things to Keep a Greenhouse From Freezing
When we started our adventure to build (well, more like rebuild) a 4 season greenhouse back in 2014, we were sure that heating would play the most important role in keeping the greenhouse from freezing in our cold zone 3 winters. Guess what, it is not! Are you surprised? Well, we did not ...
An Alternative to a Passive Solar Greenhouse – Indoor Window Garden
Welcome to another update of our indoor window garden. Today we talk about the advantage of a window garden as an alternative to a passive solar greenhouse in a cold northern climate. In our experience, the window garden has performed very well growing year round in Zone 3 (temperature here can ...
