Dan Rubin Interview

March 9, 2017 – Dale Jarvis interviews Dan Rubin, the owner and operator of Perfectly Perennial and creator of the sheltered greenhouse design. Dan tells us about the future of root cellar technology:

Dale Jarvis: What is the future then, of root cellar technology? 

Dan Rubin: Well I think that it’s such a simple and elegant design that even if you dug a hole in the ground and put a Tupperware in it with a cover and then covered that with a form of insulation, you got a root cellar on the smallest scale.

Here’s what’s interesting. At our site, we’re working on a new project and we’re calling it the earth sheltered greenhouse design. So, this is like a root cellar, in that it’s built down into the ground like a root cellar but, it’s not a root cellar, it’s a greenhouse.

So I’ve been working for the fall term with two engineering students here at Memorial University, who have collaboratively worked on the design that we now have. And we have a thirty page detailed report for a structure twelve-foot by twenty-foot with its back concrete cast wall sunk into a hillside and dug two feet down into the earth with a concrete foundation. Side walls that are standard framing but with insulation. A roof, that is a metal roof, to act as a water catchment. Two-by-six framing, insulated, and the front wall of course, south facing so that the sunlight pours in. Poly-carbon and plastic, which is relatively resilient and inexpensive.

The total cost, to my surprise, because I thought we were just going to stretch the growing season. No, the total cost for the structure is thirty-five-hundred dollars in materials, and the cost of heating it to ten degrees year round which means you can grow figs, citrus, sweet potatoes, lemon grass, in Newfoundland! The total heating cost for the year in electricity will be, by the engineers calculations, three-hundred and fifty dollars. So that’s a root cellar greenhouse, and it has the potential to change the face of local food production.