Hoophouse Greens Clearance, Warm Weather Crops Established

Our hoophouse is in transition from the winter greens to the early warm weather tender crops. The photo above shows the old lettuce mix we are about to pull up, young tomato plants edged with late spinach, and a row of early snap peas. We usually grow the quick dwarf Sugar Ann, but seed was not available this year so we are growing Sugar Snap – much taller and slower! Usually we snap the peas in three pieces and put them in our salad mix, but I think we will have finished harvesting hoophouse salad mix and moved on to cutting outdoor lettuce heads when these peas are ready. This amount of peas is far too little to be served alone as peas for our hundred people!

Transition from cool to warm weather crops

• We flag planting spots every 2’ (60 cm) down the mid-line of the bed – see the photo above.
• Harvest crops that are too close
• Dig holes
• Add a shovelful of compost in the hole
• Plant the warm weather crop
• Over the next few weeks, harvest to the south of the new plants, and anything between them that’s too close
• Over the following few weeks, harvest the rest of the greens between the new plants and then crops to the north.
• This overlap allows the new crops to take over gradually, and the winter greens to continue harvest in March and April
• Having hoophouse greens in March and April is very valuable, because the newly planted outdoor crops are not ready to harvest yet, and the overwintered ones are getting sparse.

We still have some patches of winter greens, such as the Golden Frills and Scarlet Frills mustards above. We grow different types of frilly mustard to add zip to our salad mixes when they are small. Also, the Brassica juncea group  is resistant to Root Knot Nematodes, which we have been dealing with. We just learned that Golden Frills and Scarlet Frills are both more bolt-resistant than the pretty pink-stemmed mizuna (not a juncea mustard) and Ruby Streaks.

We still have some baby lettuce mix in good shape. Here is our fourth sowing:

Our salad mixes currently are spinach, pea shoots, lettuce mix and small Frills or a homemade brassica salad mix. We are starting to crave the crunch and juiciness of big lettuces! We have a few still in the hoophouse, the last of the ones we have been harvesting leaves from all winter and spring. Most of those October-transplanted lettuces have bolted now, and have been chopped up to cycle back into the soil.

Our warm-weather crops include two beds of tomatoes, one each of peppers, cucumbers and squash. Here are photos I took yesterday. This year we are trying out Golden Glory squash (yellow zucchini), because they are able to set fruit without pollinators, and we have been having lots of trouble with what I believe are unpollinated squash with brown ends failing to develop.

More recently I heard that they may in fact have blossom end rot. I had not known this can affect squash. It has the same cause as the malady in tomatoes: a shortage of calcium reaching the top of the plant. This can be because of a shortage in the soil, or because cold temperatures slow down its transport. Less likely to be a problem in the hoophouse! In fact it is so hot some days that we have already scheduled a date to pull the big shadecloth over the top.