My Garden High Tunnel

Not much is happening yet in the landscape around our home - this is obviously nature’s season of quiet rest. Certainly I enjoy the colorful bark on the Stewartia, red-twig dogwoods and birch, the promising flower buds on rhododendrons, as well as the familiar outlines of the oak trees against the sky. Nevertheless, along about this time every year, I always experience an intense yearning for spring to begin. Seeing the first Hamamelis flowers opening on warmer days is encouraging. But browsing seed catalogs and garden magazines is a meager substitute for spring’s fragrant soil, digging my hands in the dirt and actually seeing new growth.

Nevertheless, we have some things going on. Last year our backyard vegetable garden produced a very gratifying bonus for our family. Just before winter set in I had decided to cover a portion of the garden with a short hoop tent (technically a “high tunnel”) constructed with leftover parts from our nursery container growing area. A single layer of clear polyethylene kept the wind out and enabled the ground inside to stay relatively frost-free, periodically warmed by the sun. My expectation was to “double-crop” this section. I wanted to grow a few cold-tolerant crops like lettuce, Oriental greens, spinach and peas to enjoy earlier than otherwise possible in an open planting, and later, in mid spring use the same area for regular crops.

Beginning in March I noticed volunteer cilantro, dill and arugula geminating on their own to supplement the lettuce and spinach I had sown weeks earlier. By early April our family enjoyed fresh greens daily from the garden – what a treat! By the time I removed the polyethylene cover in early May, my pea crop (planted in late February) was waist-high and already developing pods. Most notably, the entire ground inside the tent was carpeted with a delectable assortment of greens – far more than we could reasonably consume.

This winter I decided to reduce the size of the tent and better manage the crops to avoid the wasted surplus. So for 2010 we’ve set up a tent only 8 ft. long – far easier to maintain, I thought. That is, until the wind tore the covering apart the last week of January: I had used “milky” (opaque) polyethylene with insufficient support, enabling the covering to flap excessively and ultimately tear apart in the wind. Within a few days the soil inside the tent area became frozen solid just like the open garden.

 So last weekend I removed the torn polyethylene (this time using the clear type), and added better support on the windward side to secure it. I was fortunate to have a day above freezing with minimal wind to accomplish this. Already now the frost is coming out of the soil inside. With the sun setting noticeably later every day now, I expect we’ll soon see those cold-tolerant seedlings starting to germinate – I can hardly wait!