- 1 week ago
A greenhouse does not need a stove to stay useful through a cold night; it needs something heavy to remember the day. In this Amish growing guide, Elias Yoder explains how a greenhouse can hold daytime heat, soften the overnight temperature drop, and protect winter vegetables without electric heaters.
Using a simple lesson from his grandmother, he shows why air loses heat fast, while water, stone, brick, soil, and compost keep it longer. He walks through practical methods like black water barrels, dark stones, soil floors, hot beds, insulated north walls, and row covers placed correctly above the plants. The result is a clear, hands-on look at greenhouse heat storage, frost protection, and season extension for cold weather gardening.
Created for viewers searching for Amish greenhouse tips, winter gardening advice, passive solar greenhouse ideas, heat retention in greenhouses, and frost protection for vegetables. It also fits searches for homestead gardening, off-grid growing, and practical greenhouse winter prep.
Using a simple lesson from his grandmother, he shows why air loses heat fast, while water, stone, brick, soil, and compost keep it longer. He walks through practical methods like black water barrels, dark stones, soil floors, hot beds, insulated north walls, and row covers placed correctly above the plants. The result is a clear, hands-on look at greenhouse heat storage, frost protection, and season extension for cold weather gardening.
Created for viewers searching for Amish greenhouse tips, winter gardening advice, passive solar greenhouse ideas, heat retention in greenhouses, and frost protection for vegetables. It also fits searches for homestead gardening, off-grid growing, and practical greenhouse winter prep.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is a frost coming tonight, and you have been out there with a bed sheet.
00:04You have the weather on your mind, and you are standing in a greenhouse that was 90 degrees at 2
00:10o'clock this afternoon,
00:11with the door propped open because it was too hot to work in,
00:15and you know that by 4 in the morning, everything in there will be at the same temperature as the
00:20yard.
00:21And you are thinking about a heater, something to run out there, something to keep it above freezing.
00:28Before you spend a dollar on that, I want you to hear what is actually wrong, because it is not
00:34what you think.
00:35Your greenhouse is not short of heat. It made far more heat today than it needed.
00:41You threw most of it away out of the vents because it was too much.
00:45The trouble is that it has nothing in it to hold any of that heat until dark.
00:51It is a box of glass with air in it, and air holds almost nothing, and glass holds less.
00:59A greenhouse does not want a stove. It wants something heavy to remember the day.
01:06I am Elias Yoder. I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
01:11We grow under glass and under plastic through the winter with no heater of any kind,
01:17no fan, no wire running out there, and we eat out of it in January.
01:23I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:28The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
01:35My grandmother taught me this at dawn after a hard frost, when I was about eleven and convinced
01:41we were going to lose everything. I had wanted a stove put in the glasshouse. There had been a
01:47warning the night before, and I had gone to bed certain that the whole of it would be finished
01:53by morning, and I said so more than once until I was told to stop. She had me out there
02:00before it
02:00was properly light. The grass in the yard was white. The glass was frozen on the inside,
02:07ferns of ice across the lower panes. She told me to put my hand flat against the glass,
02:14and it was so cold it hurt. Then she had me put my hand into the air in the middle
02:20of the house,
02:21which was cold, but not the same. And then she told me to push my hand down into the soil
02:27of the bed,
02:28under the plants, as deep as I could get it. It was warm, not cool, warm, on a morning when
02:37there
02:37was ice on the inside of the glass eighteen inches away. She let me stand there with my hand in
02:44the
02:44dirt for a good while. Then she asked me where I supposed that warmth had come from, since nothing
02:51in that house had burned all night. It had come from the sun, two days earlier. It had gone into
02:58the
02:58ground, and the ground had held it. The sun comes every day for nothing. The whole of the trouble
03:06is keeping it until dark. Now let me explain what is actually going on, because once you have it,
03:14everything else in this video is obvious. Different things hold heat in very different amounts.
03:22Air holds almost none at all. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing people get wrong.
03:30The air in your greenhouse is not storing anything. It warms up fast in the morning, which feels like
03:38success, and it gives it all back the moment the sun goes, which is why the temperature falls off
03:44a cliff at dusk. Stone and brick and concrete hold a good deal more. And water holds the most of
03:53any
03:53ordinary thing you can lay your hands on. Pound for pound, water holds something like five times what
04:01stone does. Nothing you can buy beats it, and it comes out of your tap. So a greenhouse with nothing
04:09in
04:09it but air and plants swings wildly. Ninety by day, freezing by night. Put enough heavy wet material in
04:19there, and that swing narrows at both ends. It does not get as hot in the afternoon, because the mass
04:26is
04:27drinking the heat, and it does not get as cold at night, because the mass is giving it back.
04:33That is the whole of it. You are not adding heat. You are flattening the day.
04:40And there is a second thing that mass does for you, which nobody mentions, and which may matter more than
04:47the night. It stops the afternoon. A house that goes to ninety-five degrees in February sun is cooking the
04:56very plants you are trying to protect, and you end up standing there opening vents and letting out the heat
05:03you
05:03will want in six hours. With mass in the house, the peak comes down, you vent less, and more of
05:11the day stays in the
05:12building. So it is working at both ends, and the half you notice is the night. Now the methods. Cheapest
05:20first, and the first one is as near free as makes no difference.
05:24Water in barrels. Get drums or barrels, food grade and clean, paint them black or dark, fill them with water,
05:35and stand
05:35them along the north wall of your greenhouse, where the sun falls on them all day, and where they are
05:42not shading
05:42your plants. A fifty-five gallon drum of water weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. That is four hundred
05:50and fifty pounds
05:51of the best heat storage material there is, sitting there doing its work every single day for the price of
05:59the drum. How many? More than you
06:02think, and there is no such thing as too much. A single barrel in a large house does very little
06:10that you will notice. A row of them along the
06:13back wall changes the character of the whole place. Put in what you can, and add to it as you
06:20find more. Keep the lids on, keep them
06:23full, and leave a little room at the top in case anything freezes solid in the very worst of it.
06:30If drums are not to be had, use anything that
06:34holds water. Jugs, buckets, old milk containers, a water trough. Tucked under the benches, and along the back, painted dark,
06:44or simply left in the
06:46light. It is less tidy, and it works on exactly the same principle. One more thing on the barrels, since
06:53it has easily got wrong. They want to be in the sun, not in the shade of your own
06:59plants, and they want to be where you are not walking. Along the north wall is usually right, because the
07:06sun comes from the south, and falls
07:09on them all day, and they are out of the way. Stack them too high if the house will take
07:15it, and tie them so nothing can come down on
07:18anybody. And paint them a dark color, rather than leaving them white or blue. A dark surface takes up the
07:26sun's heat, and a pale one throws it
07:28back, which is the same reason a dark coat is warmer to stand about in than a light one. Second,
07:36stone and brick and block. A
07:40greenhouse with a floor of bare soil or gravel or brick holds a great deal more than one standing on
07:47boards. Dark stone laid
07:49along the north wall, a stack of block under the benches, old brick set down the path. None of that
07:58is as good as
07:58water by weight, but it is often free for the hauling, and it never leaks. Third, and this costs nothing
08:06at all, is the
08:08ground itself. If your greenhouse stands on soil, you already have a great mass of storage underneath you, which is
08:17exactly what my grandmother made me put my hand into. Do not cover that floor over with boards or a
08:24liner if you can help it.
08:25Let the sun get to it. Leave the paths bare. A greenhouse built on soil will always beat one built
08:35on a deck, and that decision is made before anything else. And color matters on the floor as much as
08:42on the
08:43barrels. A pale gravel path throws light back up, which the plants may like, and holds less. A dark surface
08:52takes it in.
08:53If you are laying anything down in there, dark is warmer. Fourth, and this is the old one, and it
09:01makes real heat
09:02rather than only storing it. A hotbed. The market gardeners round every city in this country, and in
09:10Europe before that, grew salad through the winter in frames with no heat in them whatever, by digging a pit
09:18and
09:19up, and packing it with fresh, stable manure, a foot and a half or two feet of it, treading it
09:24down, and laying
09:26six or eight inches of soil over the top. The manure heats as it works. Properly made, a hotbed will
09:35hold warmth for
09:36weeks, and it gives it off from underneath, straight into the roots, which is where a plant actually wants it.
09:43That is not a trick, and it is not folklore. That is how a great many people ate greens in
09:49February, before anybody
09:51had a greenhouse at all, and it costs whatever a load of manure costs you, which on a farm is
09:57nothing. If you have no
09:59manure, a heap of fresh green material built inside the house does some of the same work. And it is
10:06doing your composting where the
10:08warmth is not wasted. Now, before I go on to the night half of this, let me say one thing.
10:15Every home has leaks. Food, heat,
10:19water, electricity, laundry, repairs, and waste. Inside our Amish home savings system and community, Esther and I help you
10:29find those leaks and start fixing them one by one. The link is in the description. Now, catching the heat
10:38is only
10:39half the job. Keeping it from leaving is the other half, and a great many people do the first and
10:45not the second,
10:47and wonder why it made so little difference. Glass and plastic lose heat fast, all night, in every direction. So
10:56first,
10:56the north wall of that house is not doing anything for you. No sun comes from the north. Make it
11:04solid and
11:05insulate it. Straw bales stacked against it, boards, old blankets, a sheet of foam, anything. That wall is
11:14pure loss, and it is the easiest thing in the place to fix. Second, shut the vents and the door
11:22at dusk. Not at
11:23bed time, at dusk, the moment the sun is off the glass, because from that minute on, every bit of
11:31open
11:31vent is pouring out what you spent all day collecting. Third, and this is the one that does the most
11:39for the
11:39least, put a cover over the beds themselves at night. A sheet of row cover, an old curtain, a blanket
11:47on
11:47hoops, anything laid over the plants inside the greenhouse. You have made a small house inside the big one, and
11:56the
11:56little bit of still air trapped under that cover is worth several degrees to the plants that matter. That is
12:03the same
12:03principle I have talked about with bubble wrap on a window and with a bed. Still air, close in, round
12:11the
12:12thing you are actually trying to protect. And if you take the cover off in the morning, which you should
12:18so the
12:18light can get in, do it early. Now, there is a thing going round at the moment about a barrel
12:24of sand with a wire in
12:26it, and people have asked me about it, so let me be straight with you. Those are real, and they
12:32do work, and the
12:33men building them are not fooling anybody. But look at what they are actually doing. They are running an
12:40electric element off solar panels to drive sand up to 400 degrees, which is a thing sand can do and
12:48water
12:49cannot, because water boils and stops. So, if you have panels and an element and a controller, and you want
12:57a storage heater, sand is the right material. If you have no power out there at all, which is most
13:04people
13:05and all of us, water beats it handily. Pound for pound, water holds about five times what sand does, and
13:14the sun
13:14will not drive either of them to 400 degrees through a pane of glass. So, for a greenhouse with nothing
13:21but
13:22sunlight coming in, fill your barrels with water. The sand is the right answer to a different question.
13:29One more on the cover, because there is a way to get it wrong. Cloth or row cover laid straight
13:36onto leaves
13:37will freeze to them and do damage on a hard night. Put it over hoops, or over anything that holds
13:44it and
13:44put it an inch or two clear, and you get the still air without the contact, and take it off
13:50in the morning
13:51rather than leaving it a week. Plants under a cover for days on end go soft and pale, and a
13:59soft plant
13:59is worse at taking cold than a hardened one. One more that costs nothing and that people never think of,
14:07which is where you put the house in the first place. A greenhouse against the south side of a building
14:13has that whole wall as free mass and free shelter, and the wall gives back at night what it took
14:21in by day.
14:22A greenhouse standing alone in the middle of a field is losing out of every side of it.
14:28If you have not built yet, build it against something. And bank the bottom of it.
14:35Soil, leaves, straw bales, anything heaped along the outside of the lowest two feet all the way round.
14:43That is the part nearest the cold ground, and it is where a great deal goes out,
14:48and banking it is an afternoon's work with a shovel.
14:51Now the plane limits, and they matter, because I do not want you planting tomatoes in January on the strength
14:58of this.
14:59This moderates. It does not make summer. What all of this buys you is a few degrees at the cold
15:06end,
15:06and a few weeks at each end of the season. In my experience, that is the difference between a house
15:13that freezes solid
15:14and one that does not, which is an enormous difference, and it is not the same as a warm greenhouse.
15:20It will not save tender things through a hard, deep freeze. Tomatoes and peppers and the like are finished whatever
15:28you do,
15:29and the right answer there is to stop growing them in November.
15:33What it will do is carry the hardy things straight through the winter.
15:38Spinach, kale, the hardy lettuces, leeks, carrots left in the ground, cabbage, the whole of the winter greens.
15:46Those want protection from the worst of it rather than warmth, and that is precisely what mass and a cover
15:53give them.
15:54Watering matters too, and people get it backwards in winter.
15:58Water in the morning rather than the evening, so the leaves are dry by nightfall,
16:03and the water has all day to take up the sun's heat.
16:07Wet soil holds a good deal more warmth than dry, so a bed watered in the morning is itself a
16:14piece of thermal mass by dusk.
16:16Water at 4 in the afternoon, and you have cold, wet leaves going into a frost, which is the worst
16:23combination there is.
16:25And a cold night with a clear sky is worse than a cold night with cloud, because on a clear
16:31night,
16:32everything in that house is radiating straight up to the sky.
16:35Those are the nights to put the cover on without fail, and one word about doing it in stages,
16:42because a greenhouse full of barrels is not a Saturday job, and nobody should feel behind.
16:49Put in what you can this autumn. Two barrels is better than none, and you will feel it.
16:54Bank the base of the house with leaves, which is free and takes an afternoon.
17:00Shut the vents at dusk, which costs nothing at all and is the single most neglected thing on this list.
17:08Then add a barrel or two whenever one comes your way.
17:11A greenhouse improved a little every year for five years is a far better thing than one somebody tried to
17:19finish in a weekend and gave up on.
17:21There is no scheme in any of this, and nobody arranged anything.
17:26The money simply runs the other way.
17:29There are heaters sold for greenhouses, and there are proper storage systems with controllers and elements,
17:36and they all work and some people need them.
17:39It is only that nobody makes a living telling you to fill an old drum with water and paint it
17:45black,
17:45so nobody says it, and a thing nobody has a reason to say gets forgotten inside of one generation.
17:52What got lost was not a product.
17:55It was a grandmother making a boy push his hand into cold ground until he found the warmth that was
18:02already there.
18:03So here is what I would have you do tomorrow, and it costs nothing at all.
18:08Go out to your greenhouse or your frame before it is properly light, after a cold night.
18:15Put your hand flat on the glass.
18:18Then hold it in the air in the middle.
18:20Then push it down into the soil of the bed as deep as you can get it.
18:25Three temperatures, three inches apart, and you will know in about ten seconds which part of that house is doing
18:32any work for you.
18:34So tell me in the comments what the difference was between the air and the soil, because people are always
18:40surprised by it.
18:42And if you are new here, tell me what you are trying to carry through the winter so I know
18:47who I am talking to.
18:49Next time I want to go right back to the beginning of all of it, because the best thing you
18:54will put in that greenhouse next year is not something you buy.
18:58It is seed you saved yourself out of your own best plant, and there is a right way to take
19:04it and a right way to keep it, and some crops will come true from it and some will not.
19:10A greenhouse does not want a stove.
19:13It wants something heavy to remember the day.
19:16The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
19:22But, it's all of them that are just getting the time to think about the produce and how it's going
19:22to be collected.
19:22I want to think of how it is.