Our first hoophouse radishes germinated three days after sowing. We sowed Cherry Belle and White Icicle. We would have sowed Easter Egg if we’d had enough seed left after the outdoor fall sowings. Photo Pam Dawling
We’ve already prepared our first bed in the hoophouse and sowed our first few crops (spinach, radishes, scallions, tatsoi, Bulls Blood beets and cress). We spread the bed prep out over 5 days and the sowings over 2 days. I’ve written lots about our fall hoophouse planting, so I’ll give you links, mention a few updates and stick to photos otherwise.
Mid-October photo of September-sown tatsoi and August-sown Tokyo bekana. Fast-growing crops make good use of small windows of time. Photo Pam Dawling
Hoophouse Winter Schedule Tweaks and Improvements (pack more crops in, get higher yields, reduce or spread the workload). One change we made was to sow some early catch crops in areas that weren’t needed for all-winter crops until later. We mostly used tatsoi and Tokyo bekana, both fast–growing leafy greens. We intended to grow some early beets too, but the seed didn’t germinate. A new crop last winter was cress, Creasy Greens Upland Cress and Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure. They take 50 days to maturity (in spring). We had two good intentions we did not manage to follow through on. One was to let some of the cress flower, to feed beneficial insects. And I think we got too impatient. The other was to notice which one of the two kinds we prefer and just grow that one. We didn’t manage to keep good enough records on that, so this winter we are obliged to repeat the experiment, with more good intentions!
Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Fall hoophouse bed prep and shadecloth removal (packing away the giant piece of shadecloth until May, spreading compost, broadforking and raking the beds, direct sowing the first bed, sowing seeds in an outdoor nursery bed to transplant into the hoophouse a few weeks later). This post includes a step-by-step guide to hoophouse fall bed prep. Our soil is improving each year, becoming easier to broadfork and rake. That counters the aging process of our human bodies! One change we made last year was to measure and pin down the drip tapes 12” (30 cm) apart, and use the drip tape as a guide to making furrows (drills). This is easier than using the row marker rake, as we used to do.
Our hoophouse with shadecloth for growing summer crops. Photo Pam Dawling. We have now sewed the two pieces together, to avoid the gaping hot spot in the middle!
Hoophouse fall bed prep(includes an appreciation of spiders and a video of spider “ballooning”)
Sowing hoophouse winter crops(more details on bed prep tools and techniques, including the row marker rake if you want to use that, and links to posts about winter lettuce varieties we used in 2017/2018.)
Planning and Growing Winter Hoophouse Vegetables(hoophouse crop map, many links to other posts including a video and three slideshows, crop rotations, choosing winter hoophouse crops, posts about specific crops (with all the details), back up plans in case something goes wrong, and harvesting.)
Mid-October emergency back-up seedlings for the hoophouse. Photo Pam Dawling. We needed to compensate for poor germination that year.
Preparing your hoophouse for fall and winter(includes one of my slideshows, and a more detailed discussion of lettuce types and sowing dates, information about salt build-up and our wash-down strategy in a 3-slide mini slide show, when we close and open the doors and windows, and a Be-Prepared Winter Kit list)
Spinach seedlings (from pre-sprouted seed) emerged on the third day after sowing. here they are on day 4. Photo Pam Dawling
Winter hoophouse growing (includes a round-up of earlier posts, and a discussion about the value of crop rotation in the hoophouse, and a list of 20 benefits of having a hoophouse.)
Spinach variety trial conclusions This year we are growing Acadia. Johnny’s do not recommend this variety for late fall or winter sowing, but it did very well in our hoophouse, sown in September, October, November and January.
Two jars of sprouted spinach seeds and grits to prevent the damp seeds clumping. presprouting spinach seeds for a week in a fridge gets round the impossibility of getting spinach to germinate in hoophouse soil at 80F (27C) as it is September 11. Photo Pam Dawling
Cold-tolerant lettuce and the rest, our January 2018 assessment of the varieties we grew that winter and which survived the unusually cold spell we had.
One side of our hoophouse on Sept 10. Three beds with cover crops of buckwheat and sunnhemp (which got bitten down at a young age by Something), and one bed under solarizing plastic in hopes of killing nematodes. Photo Pam DawlingZipper spider on the pepper plants in our hoophouse September 10. Photo Pam Dawling
If you have a hoophouse, you may now be planning or planting crops for fall, winter and spring. If you don’t have a hoophouse, this is a good time of year to consider getting one. See Twenty Benefits of Having a Hoophouse at the end of that post. There are grants available from NRCS, including reparation levels of funding from traditionally underserved groups of people. There are now companies that will construct your hoophouse for you, if you don’t want to do it yourself, or can’t. If you do want to build your own, there are detailed instructions in my book The Year-Round Hoophouse. You can buy the book here on my Books page direct from me, or from my publisher New Society, or you can buy it wherever books are sold.
The Year-Round Hoophouse cover
I have many posts about winter hoophouse vegetables, so rather than try to write something completely new on the topic, I am going to give you a guide to find your way around the information already here.
Hoophouse bed broadforked to loosen up slumped soil. I’m happy to say our soil structure has improved in the 18 years since this photo was taken! Photo Pam Dawling
Choosing Hoophouse Winter Crops
(see also my post categories on the right side of the computer screen, for special posts on Asian Greens, Cooking greens, lettuce and root crops)
Hoophouse Yukina savoy at the end of November. Photo Ethan Hirsh
Last week I wrote about Winter Preparations for Vegetable Gardens. For those with a hoophouse, here are some notes on all the work we can do to grow winter crops there! For those without a hoophouse as yet, scroll to the end for Twenty Benefits of Having a Hoophouse
First, a roundup of previous blogposts on winter hoophouse topics.
Planning winter hoophouse crops includes a description of how we do our hoophouse crop planning so we can maintain a crop rotation and still pack the beds fully with hardy crops.
Hoophouse bed broadforked to loosen up slumped soil. I’m happy to say our soil structure has improved in the 18 years since this photo was taken! Photo Pam Dawling
After the set-backs with our winter hoophouse greens transplants that I wrote about in Hoophouse fall bed prep Plans A-D and spider-webs, we worked really hard and got the whole house planted up. Most of the transplants have recovered from their transplant shock (wilting each day), during the cloudy weather we had.
The new seedlings are coming up fast and calling on us to thin them. We ended up not needing so many of the Plan D plug flat plants, but we’ve kept them for now “in case” .
Plan D: Winstrip seed flats in our hoophouse on Oct 16, a late attempt to catch up! Photo Pam Dawling
Ultimately if we don’t need them, they’ll go in a salad mix. I wrote about Making baby salad mix last year. The past two days I have been able to harvest a mix in the hoophouse. The ingredient we are shortest of is lettuce. My first mix was spinach, Bulls Blood beet leaves, a few leaves of Tokyo Bekana, Bright Lights chard, Scarlet Frills, Ruby Streaks and Golden Frills, and a handful of lettuce leaves Red Tinged Winter is growing fastest, of all the varieties we planted this year.
Sowing hoophouse winter crops includes some discussion of the tools we like; pre-sprouting spinach seed and growing multi-leaf lettuce.
Making baby salad mix includes a discussion of ingredients and methods, balancing nutrition, color, shape and loft.
Young green Panisse and red Revolution lettuce in our hoophouse in November. Photo Pam Dawling
Cold-tolerant lettuce and the rest, our January 2018 assessment of the varieties we grew that winter and which survived the unusually cold spell we had. Includes sad photos of the casualties!
Hoophouse seedlings growing outdoors under insect netting. Starting transplants outdoors helps the rotation by reducing the time the crop is growing in the hoophouse Photo Pam Dawling
Do you value crop rotation in your hoophouse?
In the winter 2019-2020, a reader in the Pacific Northwest wrote: “This winter I have been re-thinking my crop rotation plan after having some issues (with flea beetle larvae in the soil outsmarting my diligent insect netting of my brassica salad crops). These days I see intensive market gardeners seeming to not worry so much about rotation (i.e. Neversink farm, etc), and yet I’ve always been taught that it is such an important principle to follow. I reviewed your slideshows on crop rotation and also cool crop planning in the greenhouse (which briefly addresses salad brassica rotation with other crops). With how much space I have and the high demand I have for brassicas, for salad mix (mustards) and also the more mainstay cole crops, I had settled on a 2.5 yr between brassica crop rotation (but planting two successions of mustards in the same bed within one year, in the year the bed was in mustards, with a lettuce or other crop breaking up the successions, with the idea that they were very short day and also light feeder crops). Wondering if you think this just doesn’t sound cautious enough, or if this sounds like a reasonable compromise with not having more space to work with (and wanting to satisfy the market demand for brassicas).”
I replied: “Yes, I do think crop rotation is important. I do know some farms seem to have given it up. I think what you are seeing shows one reason why rotation is important. In our hoophouse, we do as you do, allocating brassicas to a space for that winter season and perhaps doing more than one round of brassica crops. Then moving away from brassicas for the next two winters. If doing that doesn’t get rid of the flea beetle problem, and you are being thorough about netting with small-enough mesh netting (sounds like you are, but maybe check the mesh size), then my next step would be spinosad when the flea beetles appear. You can spray the inside of the netting too, and close it quickly. It’s that or a longer rotation, which it sounds like is not financially viable. You could also try farmscaping and/or importing predatory insects (not sure if there are any), Are there beneficial nematodes that attack flea beetle larvae? These are things I don’t know about, but might be worth looking into.”
Doing a spot of research today, I find that Heterorhabditis bacteriaphora, (Hb nematodes) a beneficial nematode fromArbico Organics will attack flea beetles. also known as NemaSeek, and sold separately. This is the wrong time of year for introducing nematodes in most of the US. They need warm weather to thrive.
Another suggestion from Arbico is BotaniGard Maxx & other B. bassiana sprays, which infect and kill adult flea beetles. Repeat applications as needed throughout the growing season.
Kaolin clay (Surround) is another possibility.
Also see Harvest to Table on the topic of dealing with flea beetles
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View through the hoophouse doors in December. Photo Kathleen Slattery
Add a hoophouse to your food production
For those of you wistfully thinking about a hoophouse, let me help you a step closer to having one next year! Sales of my Year-Round Hoophouse book are doing well, which suggests to me that quite a few gardeners and growers are thinking in this direction.
Twenty Benefits of Having a Hoophouse
An extended growing season because plants are protected from cold weather.
Faster growth and higher total yields.
Beautiful unblemished crops not battered by the elements.
Fewer foliar diseases because the leaves can stay dry.
Crop survival at lower temperatures in the hoophouse than is possible outdoors.
Better crop recovery in winter due to warm sunny days following the cold nights.
Some protection from deer and other pests large and small.
Soil temperature stays above 50F (10C) in zone 6b. Warm soil = faster cold weather growth.
Higher proportion of usable crops – more food, higher sales dollars.
Diverse crop portfolio – grow crops that wouldn’t succeed outdoors in your climate.
Harvest whenever you need the crops, even during pouring rain!
Wonderful working conditions – no need for gloves and hats; take off your coat.
A food garden on a manageable scale.
A place to enjoy practicing intensive food production.
The chance to have an area completely free of weeds – new weed seed doesn’t blow in.
No need to work with heavy machinery.
Much better value for producing crops (per dollar invested) than a heated greenhouse.
Can be constructed by generally-handy people. Specialists are not needed.
Ecological energy use. The embodied energy of the plastic is less than the energy that would be used to ship similar produce from somewhere warmer (Eliot Coleman, Four Season Harvest). Another study found this was not true for smaller (9 x 12 m) hoophouses – although the economic incentive for growers is still true, there is no energy efficiency advantage to the planet. Smaller carbon footprint: shipping 1 kg lettuce has 4.3 times the CO2 footprint of locally grown hoophouse lettuce. Plawecki, R., Pirog, R., Montri, A., & Hamm, M. (2014). Comparative carbon footprint assessment of winter lettuce production in two climatic zones for Midwestern market. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems,29(4), 310-318. doi:10.1017/S1742170513000161.
September sown White Russian kale (transplanted in October). Photo Wren Vile
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Know your climate
WeatherSpark climate summary for Louisa, Virginia. Go to the website to click for more information
The WeatherSpark website provides “The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth”. Enter your nearest town or airport and you get clearly explained info with fascinating graphics of how the weather goes over the year in your locality. Note this is not a forecast site, it’s about average weather for each place. Useful to people who’ve recently moved and want to know what to expect this winter, or to new gardeners who haven’t paid so much attention previously. Or to those who want to check their assumptions (I really thought the wind was out of the west more of the time than records say). There are charts of high and low temperature, temperature by the hour each month, cloud cover, daily chance of precipitation (both rainfall and snowfall), hours of daylight, humidity, wind speed and direction and solar energy. A big help in making wise decisions. I know that climate change is going to cause havoc with averages, and we’ll need to learn to become better weather forecasters individually, and to use soil temperature and other metrics to decide when to plant. This website explains things well.
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Winter gives a time for most of us to ponder success, failure, and possibilities for doing things differently.
