Jul 1, 2026 · 29 min · 10 segments
By storing excess heat from sunny days in the soil below his greenhouses, Tim Clymer keeps them warm on winter nights for a fraction the cost of conventional propane heat.
[gentle music] Welcome to Growing Greener, your guide to environmentally informed gardening.
Produced in collaboration with The Perfect Earth Project, this program brings you each week some expert who puts you in touch with a different aspect of gardening in partnership with nature.
Our goal is to make your personal landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.
This is your host, Tom Christopher, and today I will be speaking to Tim Clymer, who together with his wife Kat operates Three Fold Farm in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Kat got Tim, a software engineer, interested in gardening, and a Christmas gift of fruit trees initiated a new hobby for him, growing exotic tropical fruit trees such as figs and citrus.
To support this interest, Tim built first one and then a second climate battery greenhouse.
These are equipped with systems that harvest excess heat from the greenhouse on sunny winter days and store it in the soil to release back into the greenhouse on cold days and nights.
Such greenhouses cost a fraction as much to heat as a similar space heated with propane, and have enabled Tim and Kat to operate a wholesale exotic fruit business profitably in southeast Pennsylvania.
In the ensuing conversation, Tim shares the history of Three Fold Farm, the basics of climate battery greenhouses, and contact information for Atmos Greenhouse Systems, the company Tim has started to design climate battery greenhouses for clients in the hobby gardening and the farming community.
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[gentle music] Welcome to Growing Greener, your guide to environmentally informed gardening.
Produced in collaboration with The Perfect Earth Project, this program brings you each week some expert who puts you in touch with a different aspect of gardening in partnership with nature.
Our goal is to make your personal landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.
This is your host, Tom Christopher, and today I will be speaking to Tim Clymer, who together with his wife Kat operates Three Fold Farm in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Kat got Tim, a software engineer, interested in gardening, and a Christmas gift of fruit trees initiated a new hobby for him, growing exotic tropical fruit trees such as figs and citrus.
To support this interest, Tim built first one and then a second climate battery greenhouse.
These are equipped with systems that harvest excess heat from the greenhouse on sunny winter days and store it in the soil to release back into the greenhouse on cold days and nights.
Such greenhouses cost a fraction as much to heat as a similar space heated with propane, and have enabled Tim and Kat to operate a wholesale exotic fruit business profitably in southeast Pennsylvania.
In the ensuing conversation, Tim shares the history of Three Fold Farm, the basics of climate battery greenhouses, and contact information for Atmos Greenhouse Systems, the company Tim has started to design climate battery greenhouses for clients in the hobby gardening and the farming community.
