Underwater Movable Green House - Taking a Stab at Four Seasons Gardening

We've been trying to keep up with our Permaculture systems here at the Yoga Ranch (www.sivanandayogaranch.org) and something really struck me about this one thing we've been working on. See, last October, we were lucky enough to have Julia and Charles Yelton give a workshop on building movable greenhouses. The greenhouse was built on tracks and gives us an opportunity to extend our growing season quite a bit. Well, the time came to plant this year and we discovered that the area becomes a swamp in the spring (and well, most of the rest of the year too).

You can imagine some of the things that would run through my mind as I went down to plant there in the morning. I was pretty confused as to why this spot was picked to put the greenhouse and I was just feeling generally whiney. But then something great happened. I started to notice things about the soil in there (which was very weird) and things about where the weeds decided to grow and saw SO much insect/worm life in soil that looks relatively dead, truly like sand. I was pretty confused so I kept looking. There seemed to be a lot of pretty extreme microclimates in this one small greenhouse. The soil its self was divided. The top 4 inches or so were very dry, the next 4 inches were a weird blend of sand, clay and potting soil with vermiculite and below that was completely over saturated with water, probably the clay that was there for years before the greenhouse was built. Needless to say, the summer in the Catskill Mountains / Hudson River Valley region of New York State gets quite hot, especially in a greenhouse so it seems ridiculous to be planting in there in June anyway, but its really got me thinking about what kind of plant would really enjoy this situation. Its almost tropical because all of the moisture seems to condensate on the top of the greenhouse and come back down on the plants. Its extremely humid in there. I took some photos of some of the things going on in there including some of the weeds that ended up there (I'm not sure what they are exactly and if anyone wants to let me know what they might be, I'd really appreciate it!) just to show you what I'm working with. I'm going to plant a handful of different things and see what likes it and what doesn't and see if I can get away with some tropical annuals if I can. Thanks for reading! Come visit us in Woodbourne NY!  Email us: permaculture [at] sivananda [dot] org