Hoophouse Sliding Doors, Vegetable Weevil Larvae – Seasonal Challenges!

October is the busiest month in our hoophouse! The bed prep, sowing and transplanting keeps us busy for 3 or 4 hours a day. Add in harvesting (peppers, radishes, salad crops) and hand-watering of new plants, and we’re there for a good half of each day. And then there are extra challenges. Yesterday, in tightening one of the strings that mark the bed edges, I managed to hammer a 6” sod staple right through the irrigation main line tubing, which was below soil level. I can hardly believe I did that! I even thought “Be careful not to stab the water pipe!” So I had to dig it up, find a coupler and fix it right away. Because at this time of year, we rely on the irrigation for all the new plants.

And the nights are getting colder. We intend to close the doors every night when the temperature will be below 50F (10C), and the windows if the temperatures will be below 45F (7C). We have been converting the doors at one end from hinged to sliding doors. They’re hanging on their tracks, but one door is jamming in the track, and we need more than a cursory look to fix the problem. So meanwhile, only 3 of the 4 doors close!

Hoophouse Doors

My book The Year Round Hoophouse, has a chapter on making end walls, including doors and windows. Writing that helped me decide to change our east doors. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter:

 “For our 30′ (9.1 m) wide gothic hoophouse, we have a pair of hinged double 4′ x 8′ (1.2 x 2.4 m) doors at each end. Our doors open out and have to drag over the grass outside. We have found “rising butt” hinges to be helpful here. As the door opens, it rises on the curved base of the hinge, giving a little extra clearance above the ground. Each door fastens with a hook and eye to the wall when open (it will get windy!).  I recommend considering sliding doors, with the track and hardware on the inside, if the tunnel is wide enough for the track needed to carry the size of doors wanted. This avoids problems in many weathers: rampant grass-growing season, snow season, strong winds. Some people purchase storm doors and use those, but they are not very big. Anyone with basic carpentry skills can make simple door and window frames, as they will be covered both sides in lightweight plastic and not need to be extremely strong.”

•  Matt Kleinhenz of the Ohio State University Vegetable Production Systems Laboratory, has a slide show of end wall designs High tunnel end wall and door types images,
• ·        David Laferney of The Door Garden, in Building Greenhouse Doors,, 2008 has clear photos of hinged door construction for beginner carpenters.
• ·        Hightunnels.org has various articles on construction, including a slideshow Images of High Tunnel Doors.
• ·        For more to read, see M D Orzolek, High Tunnel Production Manual. See Chapter 3: High Tunnel Construction

Vegetable Weevil Larvae

Sometimes in the cool weather we have problems with this secretive pest chewing holes in brassica leaves at night. The larvae live in the soil and stay underground or deep in the heart of the plants during the day, so if your leaves are holey, but you can’t find any culprits, you can suspect vegetable weevil larvae. They especially like turnips, pak choy and the flavorful mustardy greens. We sprayed with Spinosad last Monday, then again on Friday, and this week (Monday and Tuesday) I’m not seeing any new holes.

Debbie Roos of Growing Small Farms wrote about this pest in “The Bok Choi Problem” which has good photos and a Description and Biology of the Vegetable Weevil