Making a Greenhouse - part 1

I began digging the foundation hole for my greenhouse around the end of September 2010. The finished hole is about 10 feet wide, 25 feet long with another 15 feet of sloped approach, and 6 feet deep. I used my Kubota tractor with front-end loader to excavate the area. Even though the ground is hard clay with rock, the digging was done in perhaps 8 hours and probably used less than 10 gallons of diesel fuel in my tractor. In addition to the front-end loader, I also used a three-point sub-soiler on the back of the Kubota to occasionally break up the ground before scooping it out.

The greenhouse will be located on a gently slopping, southern exposure, hillside, and is aligned north-south, oriented to the North Star. It's less than 100 feet from the house so that it will be close for water, electricity, walking through the snow in winter, and receiving a remote temperature signal.

The hole is a heat storage area and is lined with plastic and 1 1/2 inch polystyrene. Two 55-gallon plastic barrels were placed at either end of the underground heat storage area and layers of runs of four-inch slotted drain drain tile were laid out connecting the two barrels and then covered with back-fill from the clay soil that was dug.
There was a total of 27 runs of drain tile between the two barrels in four layers to five layers, about 650 total feet of drain tile is buried between the two barrels. All of the tile will eventually be buried four to six feet beneath the floor. I'll go into more detail as I document the construction, but for now just understand that warm greenhouse air will be circulated underground during the day and the heat retrieved at night. The process is called Subterranean Heating and Cooling and incorporates phase change of water to enhance the storing of energy.

I'm not sure I understand the process or the science behind this greenhouse model but I have faith that it will work in an awesome fashion when I'm finished! I'm going forward with this project with more blind faith than sure knowledge and I plan to document what I experience along the way. I hope it will be a successful adventure!

I'm waiting on a delivery truck to arrive this afternoon and then I have 10 more plastic barrels I need to pick up from some friends that are helping me along with this project. I have several stories to write of things that have already happened in this project, so I will try to catch up writing the history as well as the current happenings at Narrows Creek.