Tag: hoophouse cover crops

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.

• 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!

• Using all the space in the winter hoophouse (filler crops for random spaces, fast-growing catch crops, radish sowing dates for seamless harvests.)
• 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.

  

• 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.)

  

• 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)
• Planning winter hoophouse crops – our step-by-step process for hoophouse crop planning.

  

• 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.
• September in the hoophouse: sowing spinach 

• 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.
• Hoophouse video interview
• Year-Round Hoophouse Vegetables slide show
• Hoophouse Cool Season Crops slideshow
• Hoophouse Many Crops slideshow