2023: Winter
Intro
We were all worried about the winter of 2023, generally speaking in Texas the hotter the summer the colder the weather. With the freak storm of 21 at the top of everyone’s mind, we were all worried nothing would survive. Thankfully, the winter was more wet then it was cold.
During the summer we started planning for the winter and were trying to come up with something that would keep the plants warm, but would also be easy enough to put up and take down. The summers will blast our porch, and it is not uncommon for it to hit 135 degrees fahrenheit so a permanent greenhouse would not work. That being the case, we came up with a temporary solution.
The Green House
The green house itself was pretty simple, we started off with a basic tarp style green house and a space heater. Just to keep an eye on things we got a few ITO sensors to watch the drops and spikes in temperatures.
For the most part, this worked pretty good, but a few problems came up in short order. The first was the wind, which constantly blew the bottom up. This was annoying, but also a problem as it let all the warm air out. A quick enough fix here was outdoor tape. It was a janky solution, but we ended up just taping the greenhouse down.
The second issue that came up was this tarp was not warm enough. Once the weather started to drop below 40, it did not hold its heat. A quick and dirty solution to this was to line the inside of the green house with bubble wrap, and when we had sustained drops below freezing outside, we actually wrapped the plants with burlap.
It was far from idea, but it did keep everything alive over the winter. The coldest it got outside the green house was 21 degrees with the coldest it got in the greenhouse being something like 42.
