Meet the Family That Lives in a Self-Sustaining Living Edible Greenhouse

If you were given the opportunity to live off the grid in a green, sustainable home for three years, would you take it? When a professor at the University of Rotterdam’s Sustainable Building Technology program offered families from the Netherlands to live in this experimental greenhouse, Helly Scholten and her family jumped at the chance.

The Scholtens moved into the greenhouse in June 2015. Their home has a 1,450 square-foot vegetable garden on the roof, and the family uses this garden for all their produce and has even begun to sell some. 

But the garden-roof does so much more than just supply food – it insulates the home too! The glass windows on the roof are strategically angled towards the sun to regulate the home’s temperature.

The home is not without a lot of work and effort. Scholten told the New York Times, “We went away on vacation for a week in the summer and when we got back most of our plants had died … In a home that’s covered by a greenhouse it can get hot. Plants need to be watered twice a day, and you have to be careful to open enough windows to cool the place down.”

Scholten calls her home the perfect mix between nature and society. While the family is only set to live there until 2018, it will be put on the market, they can’t imagine living anywhere else. They might want to watch out, though … we want to move in next!

This home is definitely the pinnacle of conscious living. At least for now, we all aren’t able live in a greenhouse; however, we can all make choices to live sustainably!  If you’d like to follow their greenhouse journey, you can check out their Instagram page!

All image source: Greenhouse_Living/Instagram