DIY Principles for a Passive Solar Greenhouse

[Watchman]

For 15 years now, I’ve had food year-round,” says Penn Parmenter. Standing in expansive productive gardens of her 8,000-foot-elevation Westcliffe, Colorado, homestead, we’re talking about the 6 feet of topsoil endemic to the fertile Wet Mountain Valley. We’re talking about high-elevation heirloom tomatoes, corn and squash, and we’re talking about passive solar greenhouses.

Penn and her husband, Cord Parmenter, moved onto this land on Christmas Eve 1991, with nothing but a camper and a woodstove. Here they’ve raised three sons and an ample four-season food supply in and around a makeshift 800-square-foot home.

That first spring, they built a raised garden bed. And then another. Eventually they’d built dozens of garden beds, an iron forging business (Cord’s) and a seed business (Penn’s). They never did get around to building a proper house. “We built a tiny addition around our camper, and then we tacked this little bedroom off the back.” Twenty-four years later she says, “This is supposed to be our little temporary house.” READ FULL ARTICLE HERE