Hoop House is Coming Together

We've been struggling to get our tiny hoop house project done, racing the first frost of the season, which has been remarkably dilatory in arriving.  Not that I'm complaining, believe me. This project was slated to begin in June, and technically, it did.  It's simply been a series of one delay after another.  Unreasonably hot summer weather accounted for some of the delay, a general gardening funk on my part contributed its own special languor, needing to stay out of the way of a contractor helped us delay some more, and then my husband's broken thumb came along, right when we really needed to get down to business.

But we're finally getting somewhere.  The bones of our 12'x15' hoop house are up.  The raised beds are in, and even planted.  All the stuff we needed to attach to the frame before the sheeting went on is done.  We used up almost an entire roll of duct tape covering up anything that might possibly wear or tear the plastic sheeting.  And the sheeting is on, though not shown in the picture above.  Now we just need to get the ends framed in before it's too cold to work outside.  This will be a big job, and probably as jury-rigged as the rest of the structure.

I went ahead and planted two of the beds when I just couldn't stand it any longer.  I was worried about missing the window of opportunity with the seeding dates.  It was a rather haphazard seeding job, and a groundhog helped itself to some of my lovely seedlings, but at least there's some greenery in there for the inaugural winter.  Two of the beds measure about 3.7'x9.5',  and the third 3.7'x11', giving us a bit more than 110 square feet (10.3 square meters) of bed space.  We'll only be growing food in two of these over the winter however.

The third bed is going to house our chickens over the winter on deep litter bedding.  This saves us the hassle of rebuilding the winter quarters we've provided for them in the shed the past two years.  We've built a containment system out of green garden netting in that bed,the farthest one in the picture above.  This space is just a bit larger than the 30 square feet (2.8 square meters) the hens get each day in the mobile coop and pen system they're in most of the year.  It includes feeder, waterer, a "bleacher" double roosting bar and a nesting bucket for them.  Right now they're just testing out the new digs.  They'll soon be putting in more light tilling and weeding service elsewhere until winter is well under way.  In theory the chickens' body heat will nudge up the temperature in the hoop house a little bit, thus helping the plants.  I say in theory because even in so small a hoop house as this one, four chickens can't possibly make much difference.  But we shall see.

I've got a few more tricks up my sleeve to try out and write about in the mini-hoop house.  So there will be more posts on the hoop house as we put the finishing touches on it, move through the seasons, and learn to make the best use of it.  Stay tuned.

Early Snow Peas

Just a quick report on a successful experiment started early this year with snow peas (mangetout), one of my favorite vegetables.  Peas in general are quite hardy plants.  They even tolerate freezing temperatures, so they can be sown before the last frost of spring.  However, there's one little catch to this.  The pea seeds must have favorable conditions (meaning above freezing) to germinate.  If seeds are placed in the ground and never have suitable moisture and temperature for germination, they'll simply rot.  Once they've germinated, the seeds are as resilient to harsh conditions as the plants they will eventually grow into.

The neat trick is that germination can take place indoors.  All one needs to do is soak the pea seeds for about six hours in water to cover, and then drain them and wrap them loosely in a damp paper towel.  Keep the moist towel with the seeds in a plastic bag with plenty of air in it for 2 to 5 days, checking the seeds daily and rinsing them gently with fresh water.  You will see a pale little spur begin to swell under the seed coat.  Eventually this spur will break through the surface of the seed as a root, but you don't need or want to wait that long.  If the root emerges by more than a millimeter or so, you must handle the germinated seeds very carefully so as not to damage that root.  Far better to get them in the ground as soon as you can clearly discern the root forming up under the seed coat.

I planted pre-germinated snow pea seeds in my cold frame on the last day of January this year.  This was an audaciously early date.  But it worked.  The timing was chosen based on when we get ten hours of daylight back at our latitude.  (Ten hours of daylight being a critical minimum requirement for plant growth.)  I knew that all the growth from seed to emergent seedling would be fueled by the energy stored in the seed itself, not by photosynthesis.  Available sunlight during that time wouldn't matter, but our winter temperatures would slow down that phase of growth.  By the time the seedlings poked their heads up above the soil sometime in mid-February they'd have sufficient daylight to continue their growth so much as temperatures would allow.  Though the cold frame only has about 8 inches of headroom, I figured by the time the snow peas were of a height to make that an issue, it wouldn't be necessary to keep the cover on the cold frame any more.  That's exactly how it worked out.  The variety I grow, Snow Sweet, doesn't even require trellising, so it's perfectly suited to being started in such a small space.

The picture above is what our snow peas look like today.  I got our first small harvest off of them last night, half way through May, roughly 3-4 weeks early for this area.  Typically snow peas peter out once the temperatures get too warm.  I suspect these plants will continue to produce through June and possibly even into early July, depending on the weather.  We're planning to build a small hoop house this year, which will provide more sheltered growing space than our cold frames, and greater temperature gain as well.  These advantages should afford us snow peas even earlier in the season.  My plan is to sow germinated snow pea seeds progressively through late winter wherever carrots or other crops are removed from the hoop house beds.  I think I could eat snow peas every day of the year and not get sick of them.  Maybe by this time next year we'll be testing that theory.

If you want to nudge the boundaries of the possible with plants on your own property, you can figure out the daylight calculations for your own latitude here. You'll need a fair degree of precision in your latitude values.  You can get that by looking up your address on either google maps, or google earth, by the way.

Overwintering Rosemary in Zone 6

Time to report on my experiment in keeping a rosemary plant alive through a zone 6 winter.  Last fall I assembled one of Tamar and Kevin's instant mini-greenhouses, made from two window well covers, for my rosemary plant.  I had previously done a little homework to find a variety of rosemary noted for its hardiness, relative to other rosemary varieties.  I settled on the un-euphoniously named Arp rosemary, said to be hardy in zone 7, or only half a zone off our bit of earth.

I drilled a few small holes for ventilation at the top of my greenhouse and began covering the rosemary in November.  It came through the hard frosts of late fall just fine, retaining its green leaves fresh and ready for the picking.  I was pretty sure the truly cold temperatures of winter would send it into dormancy, and they did.  I could see no new growth, and the leaves took on a somewhat dull tone.

The question was, would protection from the wind and direct contact with snow be enough to let it survive?  With such a small space protected, there wouldn't be much advantage, if any, in terms of temperature.  A greenhouse large enough for a person to walk around in would certainly do the trick.  But this greenhouse was essentially a flimsy cloche; not thick enough or big enough to hold heat overnight.  All I could do was wait out winter's harshness and see how the rosemary fared.

Our big dump of snow came towards the end of January, and we've had snow on the ground ever since.  The snow covered the mini-greenhouse completely for several days.   I went out and scraped off some of the snow, to allow a little light in to warm up the space inside.  I suspect the snow that had built up around the sides then acted as insulation.

We're nearly to the end of February now.  Historically the coldest month of the year here is January, though we often see more snow in other months.  We're still seeing overnight temperatures substantially below freezing.  But we should only be headed into temperatures that trend warmer.  Today I checked the plant under there and found it looking fine.  It still has a wonderful scent, and the thicker stems are supple under my testing fingers.  They bend without breaking.  The color of the leaves is still dull green.  But green they are.  I'm pretty confident saying that the rosemary has survived with the help of this protection.  The plant will probably need the shelter of the mini-greenhouse for at least another six weeks though. 

Now that I know I can keep rosemary alive through a zone 6b winter, I wonder how much farther north this would work.  Any northern type gardeners out there tempted to try?

To keep this particular plant over the long term I'll have to keep it pruned such that it fits under the cover.  Or else start new plants each year.  There's enough room under there right now to accommodate another plant.  I may add some early peas in the next couple weeks.  But after the peas are done I might try planting some flat-leaf parsley alongside the rosemary, and see if parsley can also make it through next winter with a bit of shelter.  Home grown, nutritionally dense fresh parsley would be mighty welcome through the winter months.

Of course, a little success gets me scheming about other things I could plant, other non-hardy stuff I could drag into my hardiness zone by adding a few more shelters.  While it was ridiculously easy to make this mini-greenhouse from two window well covers, it wasn't exactly cheap. Not by my standards anyway.  I bought the heavy-duty ten-year covers, and I think it ended up costing about $30.  I expect they'll last even longer than ten years, since I'll store them in the shade for most of the year.  But I'm still going to keep an eye out for any other materials that might be repurposed for the cause.  I'm thinking an old skylight or the globe of a street lamp might do the trick, if I ever came across something like that in a dumpster.  I could also experiment with straw bales again.  I have plenty of salvaged storm windows to work with as lids for straw bale frames, and overwintered straw bales make such nice mulch in the spring.

Winter-Dug Burdock

We still have several gobo (domesticated burdock) roots in the ground.  I dug two of them up during a brief thaw about a week ago to see what roots left to overwinter in the ground would be like.  They were no more difficult to dig in cold earth than in warm earth, which is to say I still broke a sweat on a cold day.

Turns out I could have simply consulted the Johnny's Seed catalog to answer my questions about whether or not gobo holds in the earth through the winter.  Just last night, while surrounded by six open seed catalogs, I came across this: "...roots make a great season extension offering.  For fall, winter and spring harvest and storage.  Burdock can be overwintered in soil much the same as parsnips."  Still, it was an opportune moment to do the digging.  Temperatures are barely peaking above freezing once or twice a week.

In the course of answering my question by empirical means I found that the roots have developed a single growth ring, just as any tree does each year.  I've seen such rings before in carrots left too long in the ground.  I've heard that biennial parsnips do the same, and that the flesh of the parsnip outside the growth ring remains edible in the second year, even though the part within the ring becomes tough and unappetizing.  In gobo, the flesh is always somewhat tough, which lends it a meaty texture but also requires more cooking than for other types of root vegetable. 

The roots I dug this month were extremely large; more than two inches in diameter.  As ever, I was not able to dig deep enough to harvest the entire root.  So there's a root fragment of unknown length left in the ground for each plant that I harvested.  In wild burdock that I've dug up, the roots had hollowed out to form very large fibrous cavities.  I saw just the beginnings of this trait in the Takinagawa gobo I left for winter, though not in the least in those harvested earlier.  Where the cavity begins to form, the flesh discolors slightly and becomes sort of spongy.  I just trimmed around these sections and composted those parts.  I also found some traces of a pink coloration near the top of the root as I trimmed it.  I don't know what to make of this as I've never seen any such pigmentation in roots dug earlier in the year.  But we ate that root and are none the worse for wear, so it seems there's nothing to worry about.

I've read that burdock root stores only for one week in the refrigerator, but this has not been my experience.  I harvest the roots, leaving the very base layers of the leaf stalks intact, only very gently cleaning off the dirt that clings to them.  To do so I soak the roots in a big pot of water out on the porch to remove the soil clumps, and then shake off both water and dirt, leaving all the little feeder roots intact.  Rinsing the roots is said to hasten spoilage, but with this method all seems well. Then I wrap each individual root as tightly as can be managed in plastic wrap and store it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.  So far I've kept them for two weeks in there and they seem fine. (My next experiment will be to store one in the root cellar and see how that does.)  I can't say this with absolute certainty, but it seems to me that winter-dug gobo roots are slower to discolor when the flesh is exposed to air than are summer- or fall-dug roots.  The discoloration occurs quickly when preparing the roots by scraping them with the back of the knife.  (There are more details about preparing gobo on my kinpira gobo recipe page.)  Whereas the parts of the root exposed by breaking them off during winter harvest seem very slow to discolor.  In any case, the discoloration is purely aesthetic and not in any way dangerous.  I now put a generous splash of vinegar in the soaking water during preparation and this prevents most discoloration.

So there's my empirically derived answer as to whether or not gobo will hold in the ground over the winter.  They will, though the tendency of the plant to form root cavities may become more and more evident the later the root is harvested.  Now the question remains as to whether or not the root fragments left in the ground will rot in place, or manage to grow enough to produce top growth in a second year.  The fragments are all at least 10 inches below the surface and usually more than that.  If they rot in place, that's fantastic treatment for our clay soil.  If they regrow next year, there's a good chance I'll get another harvest from a single planting.  In the latter case it would be interesting to see how many years of harvest could derive from the initial planting.  It's also possible though that the second year's root growth might be less edible in some way.  We shall see...

Cold Frame Near the End of Winter

Our garden beds were under snow for all of February, and still are. I harvested nothing but eggs the entire month. I know there are parsnips out there that I could dig for, but with the snow cover I have only a vague sense of where I would look for them. However, the cold frame has been ramping up over the last few weeks.

Yesterday I was able to harvest a fair bit of spinach, which has come through the winter beautifully. Although 3.7 ounces doesn't sound like a lot, it was more than enough for two omelets. I also removed the most damaged looking leaves and tossed them to the hens, still in their winter quarters, and starving for green things. Defying the 10-hours-of-daylight rule, the spinach grew straight through the winter except right around the solstice. Granted, it was very slow growth in early January, but we didn't get our 10 hours back here until February 2nd. It "shouldn't" have been growing at all with less than 10 hours, but it did.

The Napoli carrots I planted in there last fall have all long since been harvested and eaten. Along with the spinach, they did the best. That's the variety (sadly, a hybrid) that Eliot Coleman refers to as his "candy carrots." The parsley and beets didn't work out so well. The winter density lettuce held on alright until it got really cold. It looks to me as though one rouge d'hiver lettuce plant is going to come back strongly, while the others succumbed. I should probably let that one go to seed and save it. The scallions I planted did so-so. Most of the oniony stuff in there now is a generous contribution from a seed swap.


In early February I casually tossed in arugula seed where the carrots had come out (top center). If you look closely you can see that it has germinated and is beginning to grow. Temperatures have been above freezing during the day for the last week or so. I expect we'll be able to eat that arugula within a few weeks. None too soon as far as I'm concerned. I want green.

Knowing what I now do about what works well in a cold frame in my area, I would concentrate on carrots and spinach if I had only this one cold frame to carry me through the winter. If things go as planned though, we'll have at least a couple more cold frames for next winter.

How's your winter garden holding up? How's your spring garden shaping up?

Homestead Happenings

The lovely gash I put on my finger while dealing with blighty tomatoes put a crimp on my posting for a while there, but now is healing up nicely. I thought I'd catch up on a few projects I've been meaning to post about for a while, but have never found the time to do. We've got some new toys: one purchased, one homemade for nearly nothing, and one made with some relatively cheap materials and an instructional class.


The first is a Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven. I broke down and bought this several months back and have been trying to learn to cook with it ever since. I have to say that this has been a challenge. We're far more likely to have a few clouds scud across the sky than wholly sunny days. While a few clouds are just fine when it's blazing outside, it's just not feasible to cook in a solar oven on a cool spring day with partly cloudy skies. This reflects a lack of really thinking this purchase through on my part.

When I have cooked things in the solar oven, it's taken quite a bit of experimentation to get things to turn out right. Also, the Tulsi Solar Oven has no mechanism for leveling itself, which is an issue when cooking with liquids. The best place for solar exposure on our property is non-level patch of lawn, so I've had to take measures to level the oven when setting it up for cooking. This wouldn't be so bad if it were once and done each time I cook. But since I need to turn the oven occasionally to track the sun, that means re-leveling it with each turn. Hassle. Now I think we need to add a solar oven table to our list of projects for next year. It would be nice to have a level staging area with a bit of "counter space" for the solar cooking I do.

Using the solar oven definitely requires me to be on my game early in the day when it comes to meal planning. I've had best results when I get my food into the oven by 9am. Quiches and strata have turned out fairly well for me. On a sunny day, I've been able to get the oven up to 270 degrees F (132 C) in a couple of hours when the outside temperature was 84 (29 C). Obviously, ongoing experimentation is needed on my part.


Next up is our first proper cold frame. We built this from a wooden packing crate for an industrial sized air conditioner. Our neighbor is an HVAC contractor, and so periodically discards such items with the use of a "FREE" sign on his front lawn. Most convenient for us. It was open on one large end, evidently where a lid had been ripped away. This wasn't best quality wood, but it had a great shape for a cold frame, and that open side seemed perfect for the bottom of the frame. I first chose a spot where it would be located, on the southern side of our garage, which is currently the last best sunny spot on our property. I parked the hens in one spot for a week to allow them to destroy the turf there. Then I added a bucket of half-finished compost from our pile each day for another week. The hens happily scratched through the compost to find bugs, breaking it down for us, while adding their manure to the spot I had chosen for the cold frame.

Building the cold frame took about a day, and mostly involved figuring out how to make a safety glass window salvaged from an old storm door fit the box. I'm hoping the safety glass will stand up better to the occasional hail storm than my first attempt with the hayframe, which used regular glass. The dimensions of the box and window were close, but not perfectly matched. After a lot of calculating and reckoning, we cut the closed end of the box at an angle to maximize sun exposure, and rigged up a few supports for the glass, including a lip to hold it in place at the front edge of the frame, and a cross piece to support its weight across the span. After that I added deck sealer all around to protect it from rot. We situated it carefully to face solar south, which is different from magnetic south, again with the aim of maximizing solar exposure. (To do this you need to find your local magnetic declination and use a compass. If you're in the US, you can use this government website to find the precise adjustment for your locality.)

I added some aluminum foil inside the frame to bounce sunlight around inside of it, and then filled it with a rich mixture of compost and our local clay soil. Leaving the box tightly sealed up on a few sunny days will, I hope, bake any incipient weedy seeds or seedlings. I've ordered a few more seeds specifically for cold hardy and compact vegetable varieties. The cold frame gives us about 9.5 square feet to plant in. I'll be starting seeds in the frame towards the end of the month, after the hottest days are over. I've found very useful guidelines for planting dates in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook. I highly recommend them both to anyone thinking about season extension.


Last but not least, my husband took a class on rain barrel construction and was shown exactly how to do it. He even came home from the one-hour class with a finished barrel. I was surprised that our county was promoting rain water harvesting, since we live in an area with abundant precipitation. Apparently the concern around here isn't drought, but contamination of streams and rivers from runoff carrying nasty chemicals from roads and driveways. So capturing the water and releasing it more slowly protects our fresh waterways. Our plan is (eventually) to chain many barrels together to collect the precipitation from our rather large garage roof. I have been using the rain water harvest from this single barrel to water a few garden plants here and there. It saves us the small amount of electricity I would otherwise need to run our pump. And it's nice to know we have that water available, even if we should lose electricity. (If you have questions about the rain barrel, I'll see if I can persuade my husband to answer them or write a post about it. But it won't happen immediately.)

Well, that about wraps up our recent outdoor projects. I'll post soon on some of the yummy things I've been doing with our garden produce and some gleaned fruits.

The Slacker Gardener's Coldframe

I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date! The late season planting date, that is.

Although I worked a larger garden this year than I ever had before, I still feel like a slacker. An extended growing season really isn't part of my garden repertoire so far, though the advantages are obvious to me. I have no greenhouse, no row covers, and I didn't manage to get a second crop of anything in for fall harvest, not even lettuce. And it's pretty late to do anything about it now, in November. But if I'm not the most diligent gardener, I am willing to gamble on long shots. But in this case, I'm hedging my bets.

I've come up with a crude coldframe idea, and I'm going to run a little experiment. What I'm trying to grow is arugula sylvetta, (also known as rocket) a very hardy and very tasty salad green. It's tough enough to germinate at temperatures as low as 40F (4.5C)! And it may be my favorite salad green of all time. We especially love it tossed on thin crust pizza just as it's pulled from the oven. I'm going to see if it can be coaxed into producing a winter crop for us when planted this late in the season. Here's the set up for my experiment.


We picked up some older bales of hay from the farmer who leases and farms our farmland. He declined to charge us anything for them. (He'll be getting a few loaves of my homemade bread next time we're up there.) If he'd had any, we would have taken bales of straw, to avoid bringing seeds into the garden. I arranged four of the bales to form the sides of a small impromptu coldframe, which I'll use only over this winter. I call it the hayframe. In spring, the hay will be turned into garden mulch. Hay is a good insulator that breathes well, and it's biodegradable. Best of all, constructing the walls of my coldframe took less than five minutes and cost me nothing. If you had to pay for four bales of hay, it would almost certainly cost no more than $20, and less if you live outside of a city. Straw bales may be even cheaper.


The top of my hayframe is a weather beaten window I picked up from a typically frugal old time Pennsylvania Dutch man. Throw it away? No, ma'am. He set it out in the yard with a for sale sign. I got it for $2. I pinwheeled the bales of hay to create an opening just slightly smaller than the outer dimensions of the window. The slight overlap of the bales at each corner provides extra insulation, at least in theory. In reality, hay bales aren't as uniform or as solid as bricks, so there are gaps and irregularities. The window simply lays on top of the bales, so the seal isn't great to say the least. But I guess I've got what I paid for. I did stack the hay bales so that their shortest sides are the vertical rise of the coldframe. That means that whatever warmth is collected inside the hayframe will stay as close to the ground, and the plants, as possible. I'm counting on the cold tolerant arugula to make this setup work for it.

In hardiness zone 6, I know I'm asking a lot from these seeds, planting them in early November, though we are having unusually warm weather this week, which may make all the difference. To give the plants a little more advantage in this marginal environment, I pulled a few tricks out of my bag. First, I aligned the coldframe to face south, so that it ekes out as much solar exposure as possible. I also cut pieces of cardboard to fit each hay "wall" of the hayframe, and I covered these with aluminum foil, shiny side showing. This will bounce whatever sunlight comes into the coldframe around very well, so that the growing plants get as much sunlight as possible.

I haven't done this yet because it has been fairly warm, but I may also put two bricks in the cold frame, one at either northern corner. These bricks will soak up the solar energy each day and get somewhat warm. During the night, they'll slowly release that warmth, giving the plants a small temperature advantage. Placing them in the corners will assure that they won't block too much of the sunlight reflected from the aluminum foil, and they won't shade the plants directly either. I'm going to wait to see what the daytime temperatures are like in the hayframe on a cold sunny day, the next time we have one, which may take another month.

I'm pleased with this little project because it puts stuff we've got lying around or very cheaply available to us to good use, at least potentially. I'll be even better pleased if it works. Plenty of things may go wrong with this experiment. Field mice could invade the hay bales. They might enjoy arugula. The window frame is also going to collect precipitation, leading to rapid deterioration of the wood. But that's just something I'll have to live with. Or, I may just have left the sowing too late. So, we'll see how the arugula seeds fare. I'll let you know how it goes.

Note: Preliminary results of the hayframe experiment are now posted.