Hoop House Update – December

Every so often, I mention the hoop house in my garden so it seems like the least I could do is give you an update on how the vegetables growing inside it are doing.

I’m growing ‘Vates’ kale, 3 kinds of lettuce, spinach and — amazingly enough — celery. More on that in a moment.

(For a quick recap, my husband and I built the hoop house 4 years ago. It is 9 feet long by 10 feet wide, and covers 2 of our raised beds plus the pathway in between. I grow cold-tolerant salad greens throughout the winter months — in our zone 5 garden — without the use of supplement heat.)

For the past week, we have had very cold temperatures, with lows in the mid-teens. That’s mighty cold for early December! As you would expect, my plants weren’t too happy about that and drooped their leaves a bit just to let me know. (I think it’s their way of saying “brrr!”)

Remember that you can click on any of the photos to view a larger image.

Even though most of the plants are doing well, my biggest challenge continues to be slugs. I’d always hoped they were tender critters and vanish in the winter but no such luck. I have tried a few things but so far, the score is Slugs 5, Susan 1. Not good.

They are primarily bothering the kale and spinach, although they occasionally like to sample the lettuce leaves. When I took the photo to the right, showing some of the kale, I thought it was a pretty decent picture (although as you can tell, I recently harvested a bunch of leaves for dinner). But then, when I looked closely at it, I noticed slug bites on the plant in the foreground. Argh! Somehow they got to the plant despite the back of it being surrounded with a copper ring (for more info on how this works, read this page). It probably climbed on when the leaves were drooping down to the soil a couple of days ago. My plan is to buy some organic slug bait and give it another go.

However, my ‘Red’ Romaine and ‘Lola Rossa’ lettuces are doing beautifully. I have been harvesting them repeatedly for salads and am impressed by how hardy they are. (And may I just add how nice it is to grow my own lettuce year-round, rather than buying some at the grocery store and then hearing about lettuce scares involving e. coli or salmonella? If that isn’t enough to make you want to try this, I’m out of ideas!)

 

In the southern bed, the ‘Speckled Trout’ lettuce is growing somewhat OK, but I think there are more slugs in that bed so they’re getting munched a bit. And notice the chomps out of the spinach leaves in the background, too. Ugh. I really need to come up with a better way of eliminating the slugs… although I do have one idea for next year’s hoop house: in the early fall, when I’m cleaning out the picket planters on my front porch, I always come across tree frogs. Usually, I move them to a nearby flower bed but next year, I’m going to put them in the hoop house and — hopefully — give those slugs a big surprise! Hey, it’s worth a try, right?

I mentioned that I was growing celery as well. I grew it during the summer months in a nearby raised bed but each year, Bill and I have been noticing how hardy they are, at least through the fall months. So we decided to see if a couple of those plants would tolerate being transplanted into a hoop house bed and how long they would last. Well, as you can see by the photo to the right, they didn’t mind being transplanted one bit AND they’re growing just fine! Amazing. So this is a little experiment of ours and I’ll let you know how far into the winter they make it.

 

The last thing I wanted to mention about having a hoop house is that whenever it snows, it is so important to brush that snow off as soon as you can. Obviously, if we were to get a really heavy snowfall, we’d worry about the weight of the snow collapsing the structure. However, the other issue is that light is crucial for plants to grow this time of year, so I knock the snow off as quickly as I can to allow the maximum amount of light to reach my plants. The photo to the left was taken inside the hoop house before I had removed the snow from the outside; notice how gloomy it is in there.

If you are interested in how we built our little hoop house, you can find that in my “hoop house project” blog post. It includes a video/slide show of the process. And you can find plenty of updates from each year of growing veggies in it by clicking on this link to my winter garden category of posts.

OK, that’s the report for now. Stay tuned for the next update!