Hoophouse fall bed prep Plans A-D and spider-webs

One of my colleagues noticed this beautiful web, like a crystal chandelier with dew drops. A few days ago I noticed lots of baby wolf spiders scurrying about. Next day they had started “ballooning” when they carry themselves on the breeze to a new place, spinning out a length of spider silk.

We’ve pulled our peppers, the last of the summer crop to remain in our hoophouse. This dislodged lots of spiders, both the zipper spiders and wolf spiders. We like to keep as many zipper spider egg-cases as possible in the hoophouse over the winter, so we have plenty of pest control next year. We move them off the plants onto the framework of the hoophouse or the hipboard “windowsill”.

This fall we have kept up with our vigorous bed prep schedule, and tomorrow we will finish. Some years it’s a strain to keep up, but we’ve now set a one week-per-bed schedule in place, to reduce stress. This year our problem has been with getting transplants germinated and thriving. We’re now on Plan D! Plan A starts with making sowings on 9/15: ten varieties of leaf lettuce and romaines, chard, pak choy, Chinese cabbage, Tokyo Bekana and Yukina Savoy, in an outdoor bed to be transplanted into the hoophouse in a few weeks. See  Sowing hoophouse winter crops  9/19/2017.

On 9/24 we sowed ten more varieties of lettuce, Red Russian klae, White Russian kale, Senposai, Yukina Savoy #2, and several frilly mustards (Ruby Streaks, Golden Frills, Scarlet Frills). We also resow anything that didn’t come up well in the 9/15 sowings (Plan B). This year, many crops did not come up well, or at all. Some seed was too old (mistakenly kept at inventory time last November). Some plants were eaten by cutworms.

On 9/30 we resow anything from the 9/24 sowings that didn’t come up well. This is Plan C. We resowed a lot this year. 9/30 is actually a bit too soon to tell if 9/24 lettuce will come up or not, if the soil temperature has cooled down a fair bit already.

We have some spare lettuce plants from the sowings made for our unheated greenhouse beds.They will help us out, as the outdoor seed bed only has half enough plants, and the numbers are going down daily as the cutworms feed!

Given the situation, we moved to Plan D. This involved sowing plug flats of crops we were still hoping for, setting the flats on one of the empty hoophouse beds, shading them and watering whenever they looked at all dry. The idea is that there are no cutworms here, and the temperature inside the hoophouse is warmer and now more suitable for faster seedling growth. (In September it is often too hot in the hoophouse to germinate lettuce, spinach and some other crops, which is one reason we sow them outdoors).

Usually we would have been busy every late afternoon transplanting all these crops, but because of our rounds of crop failures, we have had more time to devote to the bed prep.

For more about fall hoophouse planting, see these earlier posts:

Fall hoophouse bed prep and shadecloth removal 9/4/18

Hoophouse Bed Prep for Fall Plantings in my Mother Earth News blogpost in August along with step-by-step instructions on using a broadfork, a scuffle hoe and a rake to produce a well-prepared bed with good tilth.

Hoophouse vegetable rotations in my September Mother Earth News blogpost

Planning winter hoophouse crops for our step-by-step process for hoophouse crop planning

What’s growing in the hoophouse 10/10/17