Furnishing the Dome

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Since the weather has not cooperated much in terms of our working the land, we decided to work "inside". This week, we concentrated our attention on furnishing the dome. As indicated last week, our concept was to build shelving on the periphery of the dome in order to lay out seedling trays for both our raised beds and hydroponic tables.

The most difficult aspect to this was the layout of the shelving support structure or "legs". Although the dome geometry at its base is relatively simple (effectively consisting of equilateral triangles), this part of the work proved difficult. The reason for our problems was the original installation. When we mated the dome to our pre-constructed foundation, the fit was not exact and this caused a lot of difficulty in its original assembly. At the time, to overcome the problem, we installed a "spacer" of 2x4" wood beams. The net effect is that we did not have a consistent frame of reverence when installing our shelving on the foundation wall.

Installing the support structure for our shelving.

Since we are using "deck" technology, the whole assembly was somewhat forgiving and in the end we managed to generate exactly what we were aiming for. In fact, we're now ready to prepare our seedlings....should the weather finally cooperate.

The final product....shelving on the circumference of the dome.

The next step will be the hydroponic tables. The lay out for these we intend to base on our early prototype. It should be noted however that the weather in the past months has been harsh and has highlighted some deficiencies when we reach temperatures below zero.

Since our thermal mass (the large water tank) did not get a chance to heat up over the summer, this has now happened a few times. Although our day time temperatures can be 10 to 20 degrees C higher than outside, our evening temperatures have gone to as much as 8.8 degrees below zero (outside night time temperatures were 23 below at the time). Sadly, this means "good bye" to our Tilapias.

On the operational side, the net effect is twofold. First, the hydroponic beds which are shallow freeze solid and the piping linking the beds also freeze up (much like our water pipes did in the barn). Of course this is very detrimental to any plant as the roots freeze as well.

Frozen hydroponic bed.

The second effect is a bit more concerning. The solar powered pumps continue to operate and in the early morning of a very cold night, they will pump water from the large tank into these beds. The result is an over-flooding of the beds. In our case, we have observed this once and as a consequence we have lost a lot of water from our tank (and our thermal mass). We now have 12 inches less water in our tank than what we had originally started with. One of our pumps is no longer submerged and we have had to turn it off.

Our tank (thermal mass) has lost a lot of water following a very cold night.

We believe we might be able to overcome this next year. However, we will have to keep a close eye on night time dome and water temperatures in the winter.

In any event, some plants are managing to survive. Although our fennel is not looking very healthy, it is still sprouting new growth. Furthermore, any plant (in particular the lettuces) that were left in potting soil have been doing relatively well although their growth is somewhat stunted.

Our fennel struggling to survive.

I have to add that there are two very frustrating aspects to working in the dome. The first is the day time temperature. This week we have reached 30 degrees C. It is really inconvenient to dress up like an Inuit to get to the dome and then find out you have to strip down to your T-shirt in order to work comfortably in this atmosphere. We'll definitely have to add some coat racks to our furnishings!

Second, the humidity in the dome is incredibly high. It is consistently above 70%. The frustration here, as any person wearing glasses will appreciate, is that these things will fog up. We are consistently having to take off our glasses and waiting for these things to clear before starting our work.

In any case, these are just minor inconveniences or frustrations and we do have high hopes for this set up as we continue to furnish the dome. We now anticipate germinating our seeds a lot earlier than we did last year.

Finally this week, we did have a "break" in the weather. This means that we were eventually able to continue work on our Tea Room veranda. The ceiling and floor were insulated and we are now ready to refinish both, hoping to provide a much more pleasant dining environment for all of our patrons.

The Tea Room veranda is now insulated

We will end this week by reminding everyone that Chef is still working at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Oast House Brewers on Sundays. So come on by to try his cooking or just to say hello.