hey guys retired at 40 thanks for joining me again on part two of the
geodesic dome build today we're gonna put some greenhouse plastic on I'm gonna
show you how to make some inexpensive stakes to hold the framework down and
most importantly we're gonna make this a self-watering greenhouse so stick around
so it's that time of year where the weather is very bipolar when I made part
one last week I was in shorts and a t-shirt and now I'm in a hat and a
fleece but that just goes to show you why you need something like a greenhouse
to keep cover over your plants especially if you're planting early or
if it's the the end of the growing season and you're just trying to extend
it another couple months and since I made part one I've actually has a couple
of improvements through the help of viewers and just my own brainstorming in
the meantime so I'm gonna show you those right now one of the problems that I was
concerned with on this in the first one was making this just a clean area in
here and I saw there's a place called zip tie domes they sell a piece that
will work for this but it's extremely expensive just for something that can be
very simply made alright I have not decided which of the two options I'm
gonna do yet so I'm actually just gonna try and draw it out for you but this is
this would be where to all 12 of your hoops come together you take a section
of PVC this is actually a four inch and it won't work it's not big enough so
this would it would have to be a six inch or an eight inch so you would cut a
section off of that so we'll call it like a section like this and you would
stick that in the middle here and you would cut a hole into each for each one
of these to slide into so if you're looking at the open way this would slide
through that hole and they would all meet up together and then you would take
something and you would fasten them all together so if you were looking at it
from the top your hat you'd have 12 hoops coming in
and they would all be evenly spaced here where all of them come in you would just
tie them all together I think you could probably make one for $5.00 and maybe
half an hour of your time so option two would be that these would all be layered
and they would all stack on top of each other you would put a bolt through them
and then you would heat them up and make this part flat so once your bolt came
together it would only be about this big so where all of your 12 pieces came
together right here you have put a carriage bolt just like we did in the
first video down through the top of them but these would be these would be heated
up and they would be flat so they would be quite a bit more thin than they are
right now so if you want to make some really inexpensive stakes this is just
rebar I believe this is a 3/8 which is one of the smaller sizes which is plenty
stout for what you need it for you also need some bolt cutters
depending on what type of soil you have will depend on the length of what you
need to build the soil is really hard here so I tend to make mine a little bit
shorter but if you have very soft soil you're gonna want to make them quite a
bit longer so you can drive them way way down all right so I've cut mine to 40 to
42 inches long that should give me plenty of material that will be in the
ground after we put a loop on these which is what we're gonna do next
also if you don't have bolt cutters you can cut these a couple different ways
you can also use like a cut-off wheel or a grinder so if you have one the first
thing that I like to do is grind these down so you have a nice point to drive
into the ground
so now that we have a nice point on our steak and we're gonna use the opposite
end of the pointed end you can throw it in a vise like this and what we're gonna
do is heat it up with a torch but we want to bend this enough so that it will
make a candy cane shape and wrap around that pipe and that way when you hit it
into the ground it's pulling that pipe into the ground
so now this is bent you can see what I'm talking about this wrapped around here
real nice and when we get that pounded into the ground it's actually just gonna
wrap around that there you go like glove so insulted and done you'll have 12
rebar stakes that are three and a half feet long and rebar is about three
dollars a stick for those so really you're getting twelve sticks for twelve
dollars it does take a little bit of time but for what you're getting it's a
it's really inexpensive all right let's get some plastic on this you're gonna
need some rope and then you need to just lay out all of your plastic to make sure
it's going to be able to cover your dome
so I kind of mentioned these clips last time I'll put a link from Amazon to so
you can check these out they're real slick you basically pull your plastic
tight where you want it to go you preferably want to do this on a calm day
or you might end up in the next County because this basically turns into a
giant sail you want to do one pull at a time you want to leave enough slack on
the bottom then you can tuck it under so that'll give you a nice seal pull all
the slack out of it
so you can also this is why you want slack on the bottom you can wrap this
around and you can get one of these that will actually clip on to there and then
you can put your stake on to it so it clips on to this and hold your plastic
at the same time and that will really keep the inside of this all sealed up so
there's two different ways you can do this you can see that it with one piece
of plastic you're going to get some bunching up on the top here it's not
professionally crafted like this one where there's strips sewn together to
fit the the outline of the dome but you can do two pieces so one right here and
then one for the cap and then just use your clips to clip those together and
that would give you one solid piece with very few seams you kind of have to do a
lot of clever bending and folding to look good and to get it tight but it's
worth the time once the plastic is on and tight it adds a lot to the strength
of this thing so obviously you're not going to cover this with plastic all
year long in fact you're probably only going to have the plastic on for maybe
two or three months out of the year so what do you do with the dome after those
two or three months is up since we're using a trampoline you might have part
of the jump pad left ours is actually in decent shape still it makes a great
shade barrier and especially got these clasps all over the place so it'd be
great for tie-downs so you just throw this thing right over the top of the
dome like this it makes a nice shade blanket for you so ever since I started
making my first self-watering bed then I made a self-watering hoop house then I
made my whole garden self-watering so one of my main requirements now anything
that I build to grow food has to be self watering I put it on a very inexpensive
battery operated orbit timer I'll put a link in the description of the one I use
I love to garden but I hate having to water for 30 minutes a day so here are
the self watering units that I use I like them because they're
battery-operated and you just hook them up to a hose so you just hook them up to
your regular hose bib there's different types there's a single zone like this
there's a double zone they make a three and I think even a four zone if you have
different things that want you want different watering times for I
like them because I can lower rack and water my lower garden at one time in the
morning and then I can water the greenhouse at a different time in the
morning let's hook this thing up to become self watering but first if you're
new to the channel I want to take a second to welcome you we do some
gardening we do some self-sustained living we do some cooking we do some
food preservation and you get to join me and my family on a retirement at the age
of 40 so if you like the content we provide give us a thumbs up throw us a
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so normally when I use PVC and make something self watering or actually use
the PVC to make it self watering I use that as the water supply this will not
work in this case because our base is trampoline so after a little bit of
brainstorming I have a solution also take a minute to check out my videos on
this elevated self watering bed and also the self watering elevated bed so I
thought of a whole bunch of different ways to make this self watering and then
I came to the conclusion that it's really not that difficult I think I was
overthinking it so I would just basically took some stuff that I had
laying around just from other projects if you built the dome from part one you
have some leftover one-inch PVC and I had some old crappy garden hose that had
a couple holes in it and really we only need about 8 to 10 feet of a good hose
and then I went into the irrigation section at Lowe's and they make
something that you can adapt a garden hose to a sprinkler system it's just
this white piece here this would screw on to your regular old garden hose just
like this and then there's an elbow that goes from that and get you to the right
thread for a sprinkler head and then the sprinkler head is a 360 which is perfect
because the dome is 360 degrees in the circle so I'm just gonna take these
little extra pieces that I had from building the dome cut them up into like
1-inch bite-sized pieces just like we used to make the supports for the dome
and then we're gonna take all of our little pieces and then I've got a 1/16
drill bit and a 3/8 drill bit we're gonna set these in a vise we're gonna
drill one hole on one side one hole on the other using the two drill bits all
right so I'm making six of these I've done the six 3/8 holes on one side and
then punch through here with your 1/16 and drill hole all the way through on
these bigger holes that's definitely helpful if you have a vise to kind of
keep it tight otherwise it kind of likes to break free so we've got our six hose
holders you're going to need six little tiny screws like this and what these big
holes allow is for you to slip your impact or your drill through here and
actually get to the screw
all right so it's time to hook up all of our water you have to slip the hose
through the cuff and see there is a little bit of room that allows for your
screw but then you need to get a hose mender like this they're about a dollar
and we're gonna put the hose mender on after we've fed it through all of our
cuffs okay we're all hooked up in the greenhouse all right let's see if it
works success
make sure you check out my other self watering low tunnels and bed that you
can stick inside of this greenhouse to add even more cover to the winter months
this is retired at 40 remind you to live life simple we'll catch you next week