Oh, blasting caps look inocent but are like the concentrate of hell. Last year a elderly man near me comited suocide by biting in a cap and seting it off by a batery. He was beheaded instantly.
Meanwhile on the rodent war, a cat found his way in the greenhouse and did some damage to the plants hunting for the gopher. He did however expose what the damn thing was looking for. Carrots. The war remains.
I will trade your gopher for my red squirrels. They chewed the spouts off my plastic gas cans this winterā¦
Wrong thread sorry about thatā¦
Wow, you seem to have same brand of backhoe as i do!! I built this greenhouse on the south side of my house just for a head start in the spring. That is if the pic loads.lol
A update on the project
So far so good. Got rid of the gopher, so now its just watering and a few squirts of tabaco tea for bug control now and then and thats about all there is done once the plant sistem is astablished.
Edit: sorry l forgot to flip the phone sideways
Hi Kristijan,
impressive achievements with your greenhouse! And you were quite busy digging into the ground. Two things I want to mention here:
I donāt know your soil/rock conditions and how stable it is, but if you are expanding your cellar, maybe think about installing some supports or pillars. There is an enormous weight above your head and I donāt want to imagine a collapse.
Also, please keep ventilation in mind. There is an oven in the greenhouse and CO2 might accumulate in your cellar.
I donāt want to sound too much nanny-like and most likely you have thought about that. I just wanted to mention it.
Regards,
Til
Hi Kristijan,
Can you stop posting please ? 
Now i have to go out for buying another new keyboardā¦
first the like button on your gasifier builds, and now on your greenhouseā¦
Any idea to prevent the worn out like button ?
( Canāt help the mania i have if reading about your achievementsā¦ my thumb just hit the like button the moment i see your postā¦ )
Great greenhouse, great jobā¦great ideaās
Til,
Thanks for the concern!
I visited a famous Slovenian wine county south east of me before l atended the project, they are famous for their root cellars. We have identical material to work with, its a super compressed quarz sand, sandstone basicly. I visited the largest cellar in the county,
https://www.google.si/search?q=repnica+najger&oq=repnica+najger&aqs=chrome..69i57.7595j0j4&client=ms-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#lkt=LocalPoiPhotos&trex=m_t:lcl_akp,rc_f:nav,rc_ludocids:3734156578377431638,rc_q:REPNICE%20NAJGER,ru_q:REPNICE%20NAJGER&viewerState=ga
As you can see they use nothing but what nature provided milions of yers ago. Just carved sandstone.
The owner provided me a simple stability formula. Minimum sealing thicknes is 4m, max room diameter allso 4m and everithing must be arc shaped. They tested their cellar first with 6 sticks of dinamite blown inside, then with a 10t tarmac roller on top with full vibration. Not a crumble was seen. The callar allso survived 2 nearby earthquakes with the workers not eaven noticeing it from the inside.
My cealing is 6.5m thick and the āsocial roomā will have a radius of 3m so shuld be ok.
I will cast the stairs and hallway in concrete thugh!
Ventilation. Your concern is valid here. Not so much becouse of the wood burning stove but becouse of the wine fermenting in the cellar. Its a death trap if not made correctly. The mentioned cellar has a 4" pipe hiden under the floor of halways with a fan constantly pumping air from the lowest point of the cellar. I will do the same. Plus, kerosene lamps will be the only sorce of light alowed down there. Shuld the co2 level rise criticaly the lamp will extinguish and warn the people to get out.
Koen, haha likewise on the instant like reflex 
wish you the best trip to the US of A and take many pictures/videos!
I am impressed at how much digging you have done Kristijan! It looks like you will have quite a nice storage space once you are done. Have you thought of digging out some sort of sump in the floor for your spring?
As for your CO2 problem, you will produce much less if you do your primary fermentation on the surface, and then transfer the pressed out wine to the cellar to age it. Also, I am not an expert on CO2 and closed environments, but a quick search turned up this link: https://www.power-eng.com/articles/print/volume-102/issue-4/features/gas-turbine-fire-protection.html
āCarbon dioxide is inexpensive and nondestructive to equipment, but is lethal at the concentrations required for fire extinguishment. According to NFPA 12, Carbon Dioxide Extinguishing Systems, the minimum required CO2 concentration for fire extinguishment is 34 percent, which is adequate for fuel and lube oils.ā
I also found: CDC - Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health Concentrations (IDLH): Carbon dioxide - NIOSH Publications and Products āa few minutes of exposure at 70,000 ppm and 100,000 ppm produces unconsciousnessā (7-10%).
I would be very cautious about putting anything down in that hole that makes CO2. We dont want it to wind up being your tomb!
On a related subject, we have a company here in town that builds turkey butchering/hanging systems that gases the turkeys with CO2 that makes them unconscious in the transport cages. Workers then donāt have to fight the turkeys while hanging them on the conveyors and their hearts are still pumping which drains them fast after they are slit.
I have a rather wacky idea for the water but lets keep that a secret just for now its a far shot.
With wine your idea wuld work. With beer its gonna be tricky as it must ferment in a cooler area (the reason l am making a deep root cellar) Perhaps pipe the gas directly from the airlock to the outside trugh a thin hose?
Don, our local slaughterhouse does the same with pigs.
The nature of CO2 (being wery heavy) can be your friend and enemy here. If the flame of a candle/lamp is lower thain your head you will be warned in time. But shuld for any reason feel dizzy and sit down you are screwed. Every year there are about 1-2 cases of CO2 related deaths in wine cellars in Slovenia. People go down without a candle, feel dizzy, sit down and fall asleep iternaly. The sadest thing is usualy there are more thain one victims as bystanders usualy try to lift the winekeepers and they pass out as well. As a matter of fact, my wifes relative allmost lost his life this way 2 year back. It is no joke and every percusion must be taken to concideration. I am actualy more afraid of CO2 thain CO. The unbearable headacke from CO will usualy tell you something is off (dont ask how l know this) but the CO2 will just drain your life slowly and unnoticeably.
Hey, A quick search of the internet confirms my hunch - off the shelf CO2 meters are mostly geared towards industrial applications - so there dont seem to be many cheap homeowner models. I guess most people are not digging deep pits in their backyards and fermenting things in them - how boring. It does look like you can get something for 100-200$ - I would personally feel like my life was worth that muchā¦ then again, if you wanted to spend a few hundred bucks, you could have made yourself a beer fridge and brewed your lager in the garage without all that digging!
I was going to ask if you knew anyone who was smothered in one of these cellars - and so clearly this is a dangerous situation. It seems to me that the idea of using an open flame to detect pockets of CO2 is a recipe for disaster, as my (very hasty) research suggests that a flame will stay lit well beyond the safe range for you to breathe.
Clearly this type of cellar is in use, so it should be possible to do it safely. I think your idea of venting the CO2 from the fermentation lock would be a good one - as well as an active ventilation system pulling air from the lowest point and discharging it far enough away from the opening to ensure the heavier CO2 doesnt sneak back in.
From a design standpoint you could probably reduce the risk somewhat by ensuring that your floors all slope to a single point, and then put your exhaust fan there.
Also, it seems like it would make sense to crunch some numbers. Like, how much CO2 is produced by fermenting 20L of lager? Roughly how many cubic meters of air do you have? How long would it take your fan to completely refresh that air? Using those figures, you should be able to come up with a relatively good idea of what would lead to an unsafe concentration of CO2 - and then dont do that.
One last thought I had - you are on a hill, right? How far sideways would you have to go to get to daylight? I am guessing far enough to not be worth trying to dig a ventilation shaft, but thought I would at least float the idea.
I somehow missed that last post Carl!
Well l do plan to make a second entrance eventualy, and a nother greenhouse in that manner, not far from this one, but the shaft wuld still be inclined.
Not this topic related but l thod l wuld share this trick My wife got a genious idea a few days back, and l tested it today. It works GREAT! No more hand picking the potato bugs.
I made a shopvac backpack and vacuum the bastards in. Still need some practice (a few fell down) but it works great and FAST!
Kristijan,
How about building (digging) (drilling?) a vertical hole near the rear of the cellar to the surface with a straight ladder and a hatch or scuttle at the surface. It would just have to be large enough for you to get in or out and would give access for air ducting and hoisting heavy objects. It is hard for me to visualize the (sandstone) material your hillside is made of. If I dig down a few feet of the flat farm fields where I live, the hole will soon be filled with mud and water.
No bugs here, but on the other hand the potato leaves just started to see daylight the other day
It was hard to see in the video and pictures, but are those Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata)? What we call a potato bug here is Armadillidium vulgare, which Is not really much of a nuisance unless they overwhelm the greenhouse. I have turned chickens loose in the winter to eat them up- but they will also eat all your lettuce, knock over anything that isnt nailed down, and generally make a giant mess. Not sure if that approach would work in the potato patch, and I have thankfully never seen that particular pest out at our place. I am scaling back my potatoes this year, but I have about 100 meters of them. Our summers seem to be getting too hot for good potato yields, so I have had better success with Ipomoea batatas. Also, you can propogate them by cloning the shoots, so I could start well over 100 plants from about 6 tubers. I would need to save 20 lbs of seed potatoes to fill the same space.
I am experimenting with a bunch of new crops this year - including chufa (Cyperus esculentus), safflower, lentils, millet, and oil seed sunflowers. This fall the plan is to try and eat only food off the farm for a whole week. (except coffee, which is not really so much a food, as a ānecessity for lifeā) I even boiled down a couple gallons of sea water I dragged back from the coast, and made a rather surprising amount of salt. Its going to be the first week in November if you feel like joining in the spirit of Farm Week (if even just for a day, or a meal). You could even use store bought salt, I wouldnt judge you. 
It is pretty satisfying to eat a farm meal, even if it isnt very fancy or sophisticated.
Mike, lll get to you later.
JO, ha, we eaten the first potatoes altready!
Carl, yes those are Colorado bugs. If left untreated they will destroy a crop in a week. Just vacuumed about 5 pounds of them yesterday!
Pitty they are poisonous so cant be fed to birds. I have a flock of young turkeys that wuld be all crazy for a meaty snack.
Funny you mention batatas, l was just about to ask here about them. I am having them too this year and l already like the reproduction sistem. They root so fast! Any growing tips?
Mr GarryT was wery generous this winter and sent me a colourfull collestion of āexoticā seeds so we expect a colourfull crop. Milet and lentis are a first for me too, allso a pallet of different tomatos, chillis, mung beans, cucamelon, tomate verdeā¦
Ha, l like that challange.
I have only grown batatas for 3 years or so, but they have always been pretty easy for me. They have a long season, so they need to be watered - I generally do regular potatoes dry-land. I usually just wait until the first frost starts to kill the vines sometime in october/november then dig em up. Last year I got a finally broke down and got a middle buster plow to dig up potatoes with, and that has made a huge difference. We have heavy clayey silt loam soil, and it was a lot of work to dig by hand. The tractor can cruise down a 160ā row in about a minute, then all I have to do is go pick up the tubers.
Here is a method that works realy well on gophers. Harmless on the soil as all the byproducts of the burn are potasium salts, carbon and some sulfur. If the smoke doesent kill the gopher, the smell certainly changes his mind if he is thinking of making the new home permanent.
Ps. I just realised, on the first cartridge (made of newspaper) there is a title āhudiÄa spekelā wich translates to ābake the devilā. Coincidence?
Nature never seases to surprize!
