Extending The Season

Image Gallery Bob harvests fresh greens from the tunnel cloche.

All right, so don't have a $5,000 solar greenhouse. That doesn't mean you can't grow your very own fresh winter greens.

by Susan Glaese, Bob Kornegay, and MOTHER's staff

Fall. A few lights frosts, some frantic scrambling to pick everything salvageable from the garden, and then— wham ! A hard freeze hits. All your plants die. Time to call it quits... another gardening year is finished.

Ahhh, but wouldn't it be nice if you could keep your crops growing? If you could step outdoors in the winter and harvest a few vegetables to sustain you through those long months of preserved and purchased produce?

Well, the good news is that you can do just that. The better news is that doing so won't cost you an arm and a leg; we're not talking here about building a full-sized solar greenhouse. And the best news is that—if you hop to it—you can do it this very fall, in time to have your own cold-weather harvest.

This article will tell you how to build MOTHER's gardeners' two favorite low-cost, season-extending devices . . . how to use and maintain them . . . and what crops to raise in them.

THE TUNNEL CLOCHE

Collect some 2' pieces of rebar, 5' to 10' lengths of 1/2" PVC pipe, one sheet of 6- to 8-mil clear plastic, and two pieces of rope, and you've got all the ingredients for a tunnel cloche. It's easy to build, portable—you can even construct it right over a bed of already established fall greens—and quite inexpensive (it'll cover 48 square feet for around $15).

And this simple crop saver really works! Last fall Bob Kornegay tunnel-cloched a 20-square-foot bed of spinach behind the low-cost permaculture homestead at MOTHER's Eco-Village. The greens—which had been sown outdoors in September—made it fine through the winter in our 4,200-degreeday climate . . . including the record-breaking night when the mercury hit 16°F below zero! During those cold months, they grew sparsely: just enough so Bob could harvest fresh leaves for salads about every other day. By the end of February, though, he was giving salad leaves away. And come March, he had all that he could cook up, eat raw, and freeze!

Fig. 1 shows the parts of a PVC tunnel cloche. To put one together, all you have to do is drive two-foot lengths of rebar (iron reinforcing rod) into the ground every three or four feet on either side of the growing bed. Bend a PVC hoop over each set of rebar pieces. (The exact length of the PVC will depend on the width of your bed: five feet of pipe for a two-foot-wide bed, eight feet for a three-foot bed, nine for four, and ten for five.) Drape your plastic on top and then secure it at the base to keep that cold night air out. You can do this by simply weighting down the sides and ends with rocks, or by bunching the ends together with ropes and snugly securing those lines. Bob has found that the only time he really needs to tie his cloches' ends is during March, when our area receives strong spring winds. Then he uses an adjustable slipknot—shown in Fig. 2—to keep those cords tight.