Use Low Tunnels to Grow Veggies in Winter: Quick Hoops

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Using these inexpensive low tunnels, you can protect plants throughout winter for a fraction of the cost of building a greenhouse. KRISTIN HURLIN

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

As a farmer, I’m always looking for new ideas and simple, low-cost solutions to improve production and efficiency. I have never found any activity that cannot be improved (and then improved again) by a diligent process of critical evaluation. Long before my wife, Barbara Damrosch, and I came up with the design for our low tunnels (miniature greenhouse tunnels), we had already improved our greenhouses by making them moveable, first on skids and later on wheels. But innovation is a never-ending process. The ideal solution is always less expensive, simpler to build and less complicated to manage. We consider it pleasant mental exercise to refine all aspects of our agricultural production to the essentials.

For a harvest of mature onions in early summer to sell at our farm stand, we were interested in growing the fall-planted onion varieties listed in seed catalogs. ‘Olympic,’ an overwintering onion from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, has become our favorite variety. It only keeps in storage for a few months, but that’s no problem because they all sell by the time later onions are harvestable. Because the low temperatures here in Maine are too harsh for overwintered onions to survive, we needed to grow them with protection from the weather. We decided to grow them in one of our unheated moveable greenhouse rotations.

We drilled the seed in late August, left the onions uncovered until we had harvested the last of a late sowing of greenhouse-protected lettuces just before Thanksgiving, and then moved the greenhouse to cover the onions for winter. To be sure there would be sufficient winter protection, we put an inner layer of floating row cover supported by wire wickets inside the greenhouse. In late March when we moved the greenhouse, the worst of the winter cold was over. The onions looked green and beautiful, and they matured in June to give us the early harvest we had hoped for.

But we knew we could do better. Although we had onions to sell in June, we hadn’t sold anything from that greenhouse all winter. In another mobile greenhouse rotation, we had harvested mid-September-planted spinach from mid-November right through the winter. And in April we followed that spinach crop with transplants of Tuscan kale, which we were also selling in June. The demand for winter spinach was insatiable, and we would gladly have had that onion greenhouse filled with spinach. But the onions were a great crop. We started thinking about simpler, less-expensive protection than a greenhouse.

Low-tunnel Greenhouses

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print