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Well, it took me longer than I expected to get my Fall Vegetable Production slideshow up on SlideShare.net after the Pennsylvania Mother Earth News Fair, but here it is.
Now I am starting to plan for the October 25-26 Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka, Kansas. I’ll be doing three workshops: Cold-hardy Winter Vegetables on Saturday 10 am on the Seed Stage, Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops on Saturday at 5.30 pm on the Seed Stage, and Fall Vegetable Production on Sunday at 11.30 am on the Grit Stage. As of today, they are not yet listed on the website, but soon they will be. A chance for me to meet some non-East Coast people!
At home, we have been plugging away at replacing the end wall plastic on our hoophouse. No action pictures yet, but lots of progress. I always over-estimate how much we can get done in the time available. I forget we have a lot of new people, who work part-time. I’m busy compiling a list of tips for replacing hoophouse end wall plastic next time. We bought a roll of plastic 24′ x 100′, and our gothic-style hoophouse is 12′ at the apex. What was I thinking? There’s no spare between 24′ and 2 sides at 12′ each! We learned by accident that the plastic was not evenly folded, so our “midline” cut wasn’t and we got one “half” bigger than the other. This turned out to be a stroke of luck! We used the bigger half outside and the shorter half inside. We solved the shortage by having the top triangle indoors be covered by a separate piece of plastic, letting the big piece of plastic start just above the end wall window, (which is above the double doors).
We learned to mark the center-point of each piece of plastic, to help with lining up from side-to-side. We learned to put the edge with the big printing up high, where most of it gets cut off anyway, so we don’t have to stare at it for the next 7 years or so. We learned to keep the surfaces that had touched the ground facing outward, so we don’t trap dirt between the two layers of new plastic. We learned that it’s best to get both layers of plastic up on the same day, or else the inside of a single layer is coated with condensation next morning, and you have to mop it dry to avoid trapping water in the space. We learned that it really doesn’t take many 100′ lengths of old drip tape to batten two hoophouse ends. We learned that all staple guns are temperamental. We learned that having only one roll of duct tape on the job is a false economy, as it creates a bottleneck when only one person can be covering all the protruding metal bits the plastic will touch. And, once again, I appreciated how nice it is to have someone else cooking lunch for us, so we can work on the project up till the last minute. Hooray for community!
