Category: High Tunnel

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Rodent-Proof Your Greenhouse: New Year’s Rebuild

We sure know how to celebrate the New Year! We just finished rebuilding our propagation house benches.

Several weeks ago, voles ate nearly 2000 baby veg plants in our propagation green house.
Never again! We rebuilt the heated benches with metal pipe legs that rodents can’t climb and little sheet metal barriers to prevent rodents from jumping aboard.
Here are another 2000 plants newly seeded, including lettuces, spinach, and cilantro. About a month from now they will be ready to transplant into our high tunnel greenhouses.

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Summer has finally arrived

We just finished transplanting the last row of our high tunnel with cucumbers. We have 270 tomato plants and 450 cucumber plants, and all them are growing by leaps and bounds now that the weather has finally warmed, after one of the coolest springs in recent history. It will be another couple weeks before we start harvesting these warm weather veg, but in the meantime our self-serve farmstand has bagged salad mix, cabbage, kale, green onions and an assortment of bunched herbs.

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Winter salad greens

winter salad greens
A week of sunny days does great things for hoophouse greens

The cucumber and pepper crop in hoophouse #1 was ripped out, and replaced with transplanted spinach, arugula, and romaine lettuce and direct-seeded lettuce for salad mix a couple weeks ago. They are doing well, despite nighttime temperatures of 28 degrees.

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Sowing Winter Crops

Seeded Hoophouse
Hoophouse seeded with carrots, spinach, and hakurei turnips

After it’s summer crop of tomatoes and peppers, the new hoophouse has been seeded for its winter crop of carrots, spinach, and hakurei turnips. This winter crop is always risky business because germination takes weeks and nothing really grows significantly until day length increases to 10 hours, which happens in the middle of February.

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The new hoop house begins production

High Tunnel #2

The new hoop house is complete, and it survived the weight of 2′ of wet snow without damage. Although the weather continues to be exceptionally cold (Feb. temperatures have averaged 10 degrees below normal below normal) we have begun transplanting lettuce and hakurei turnip plants. These should be ready for harvest in late April, to be replaced by pepper, eggplant, and tomato plants.

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New Hoop House!

High & Dry Farm is constructing a new high tunnel greenhouse, in preparation for the new growing season. We have almost completed installation of the supporting hoops.  No prefab kits here. The hoops are fabricated from chain link fence top rail, which is bent into the correct curve on-site.