26' Geodesic Dome 4 Season Greenhouse
Hello Everyone, this is not a boring how to build a Geodesic Dome story but our adventures of building our 26' Geodesic Dome, pros and cons of the 26' Arctic Acres Geodesic Dome and also some things we would do differently next time; and yes we would totally build another! We purchased our Geodesic Dome through Arctic Acres located in Ontario Canada very similar to the design by Growing Spaces in the United States of America. If you are interested in the Geodesic Dome build or materials used during our build you can check out our YouTube Channel @AlbertaAdventurerFamily. We have made several videos on the 26' dome. You can also check our Arctic Acres & Growing Spaces Channels to see all the Dome sizes available. Click the video below to watch or keep reading on.
We are happy with the size we chose however we decided to make ours a tropical zone 5-10 in our crazy Northern Alberta Winter Climate. Will we be successful growing citrus trees and bananas at -40 C? They advertise that at -30c the inside dome temperature will be 0C on a sunny day. Well we decided that would not be good enough. So yes we have opted to add in natural gas but also a wood stove that we are currently installing. Now if we rebuild a dome again we would build on a cement pad with in floor heat connected to a exterior wood boiler system. This would make it more self sustainable. We are also curious how much thermal mass the pond will radiate within the dome under the North wall reflective panels.
The next thing we should have done was build a 42' Dome because well these things are pretty cool and our imagination is running wild thinking about the possibilities in that large of a space. Well anyways lets stop dreaming and talk about the beautiful space we have created on our 4 acre Homestead. We have placed a beautiful Granite Flagstone pathway with stones from Salt Lake City. Between the stones we have placed small pebble stones. Around our seating area we have just placed pebble for now but would eventually like to put a patio brick are so our chairs sit level and we can sit cozy around our future wood burning fire. One reason for the large granite stones was we wanted to remove our shoes and be able to walk barefoot to ground with the earth in the middle of winter.
The greenhouse comes with Solar fans however if it wasn't sunny the fans would not work so we connected a SOK lithium Battery to hold charge and power all the fans. We also opted to run electrical into the dome for lights as our winters are dark . Maybe one day we will hook all the lights to solar panels as well. We have also ran a small heater into our pond as we have a license for Tilapia fish. We are experimenting with aquaponics a bit and of course the fish poop makes amazing fertilizer. Our ultimate goal with this Geodesic Dome is to make one amazing ecosystem that thrives. We wanted a peaceful place to retreat to when our winters are cold and dark. We also homeschool our girls and spend a lot of time teaching them about where our food comes from. With the food shortages, constant recalls and diseases, moldy produce in our grocery stores we decided to take things into our own hands!
We started building our Geodesic Dome May 21st 2024 and still have not finished... well we have other than some outside landscaping and the fireplace. Also the plants are ever changing so is the dome ever complete? I am writing this just before Halloween so our Dome has been growing food for 3.5 months since we filled the beds with dirt. We have harvested so many herbs, Tomato's, peppers, and cucumbers galore. So what else are we growing? We have planted our center bed with topicals, citrus and herbs and the exterior with some survival everyday crops. However the plants arrangement is constantly changing and we are finding other ways to grow as well. We have hanging baskets with strawberries and nasturtiums which are an edible flowering plant and have just started some aquaponics tubes above our pond where we are also trying to grow strawberries. We have an area dedicated to herbs but wonder if spreading them out could be beneficial to fight off things like mites and aphids. Companion planting is an amazing thing that we are slowly educating ourselves with.
We still have many things we want to do to the dome and love walking inside daily to see what surprises she has in store for us. When the citrus trees are in bloom you notice the second you walk through the door. We are counting down the days until we can eat our first cavendish banana. If you are still reading Thank you and we hope you also enjoy the videos and follow along for more homestead adventures!
-Alberta Adventure Family
