Hoop House Move and Winter Garden

Now that fall is here, that means it’s time to move our hoop house and put in the last of the winter garden. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, even though we live in USDA zone 5, I’m still able to grow vegetables year-round… and without the use of supplemental heating. More on that in a moment.

But first, I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the steps we go through in order to move our small hoop house. It is 9′ long by 10′ wide and covers two of our raised beds. We made it four years ago and you can watch a video on the process and see a supply list in this blog post.

   

In the photos above, Bill is raking the bark away from the 2 beds that the hoop house will be covering. Then he removes the concrete blocks and rebar posts that the hoop house was attached to in its current location.

   

We use a wheeled cart under one end of the hoop house and Bill lifts the opposite end, then we just wheel it to its new location. You wouldn’t believe how quickly this all takes place! Then Bill reattaches the hoop house to the rebar posts, although it’s in a fairly sheltered location now.

I have learned over the past four years that it’s important to select cold-tolerant vegetable crops and varieties. This year, I’m growing a dwarf ‘Vates’ kale, ‘Matador’ spinach, corn salad (mache), miner’s lettuce (claytonia) and regular lettuce.

Of those crops, I started everything but the corn salad and claytonia indoors just to get them off to a good start. The others like to be direct-sown into the garden bed. Everything was planted about 3 weeks ago, although I have to admit that I should have started them a couple of weeks prior to that but have been a bit too busy lately.

One of the frustrating things I’ve found is that slugs can be a problem. You would think they’d die off during our cold winters but no such luck. Slugs absolutely love to eat kale leaves, so I have a system for keeping them away from the plants.

It involves the use of Corry’s Slug & Snail barrier tape. I’ve learned that the copper tape reacts electrically with the slimy skin of slugs (and snails, too, but we don’t have those here), so they don’t want anything to do with it. All you do is make a ring out of it for each plant, staple it together, and place it around the base of the plants. For me, this really only applies to kale plants because they are the most feasible to protect with the rings.

   

 

For the other crops, I’m keeping a close eye on them. If I see any slug damage to them, I’m going to sprinkle some diatomaceous earth on the soil surrounding the plantings. 

We are keeping one of the hoop house doors open, and I’ve covered the lettuce/corn salad/miner’s lettuce bed with bird netting for the time being since birds sometimes go into the hoop house (the nerve!). The other bed (kale and spinach) is covered with floating row cover because — believe it or not — cabbage butterflies and leaf miner flies have been known to fly inside the hoop house in past years and I want to protect the plants from them. Five years ago, when I planted my first winter garden, I just assumed these insects wouldn’t be around in the fall. Boy was I wrong and yes, they caused a lot of damage!

Here is how everything has been planted (this was taken prior to covering the individual beds):

   

Stay tuned for updates on how the winter garden is doing!