Things are moving along with the second hoop house that we’re building using funds from our SARE grant - sort of. Like many industries, we’ve hit a dreaded supply chain roadblock. We’re awaiting the arches needed for the top of the hoophouse but they’re not expected to arrive until mid-September. Despite that, we’ve got the ground posts in and now we can hurry up and wait.
Ground posts awaiting arches
While we wait, we decided to put a rye cover crop on the soil to hold it in place until the arches are up. It adds a nice biomass to the soil when we crimp it over. We’ll then add compost to the crimped rye and plant directly into it. Our plan is to harvest all of our tunnels in succession starting around mid-October, or depending on how late of a frost we get. The supply chain backup means we’re going to be using every second of daylight to ensure we can get things planted so you have spinach in late winter! Our hope is to finalize planting in this new hoophouse the first week of October so plants have enough daylight to establish themselves. After November 7, we go back to less than 10 hours of daylight per day and growth slows dramatically. Plants need to be approximately 60% to maturity by November 7 or they won’t collect enough winter sunlight to be full grown by January. All that said, we feel confident that we’ll have time to complete this hoophouse when all the parts arrive, and to get things planted and soaking up sun before we’re back in the grip of fall once again.
Our harvest plan for the remainder of the season looks something like this: we’ll start harvesting out of our caterpillar tunnels, then move to hoophouse 1 around late November/early December, and we’ll harvest that through early January. Afterwards, we’ll move to hoophouse 2 (the one we’re awaiting arches for), and harvest that through February or March.
Then the fun begins again and we will replant hoophouse 1 in February, then the caterpillar tunnels and hoopehouse 2 will follow in early March. The hoophouses will get a quick round of greens to kick things off, then they’ll be switched over to tomatoes in May.
Stay tuned for more updates!