My mailbox has been filling up in recent weeks. While a part of me hates to think of the number of trees that have been sacrificed to produce this year's crop of seed catalogs, another part of me is jumping up and down with glee.

 It is finally time to begin planning the 2012 garden. That's right! Regardless of whether or not the world ends on December 21st (as predicted by the Mayans)we still want fresh veggies to enjoy throughout the summer and fall.

 I always approach the garden with such optimism. The plan usually includes some innovative design plot that I've seen over the years at nearby Cornell University. When I'm in garden planning mode, weeds drought and garden pests don't exist. Instead, every vegetable is envisioned in a blemish free state and is the epitome of perfection.

Despite all of the choices offered by the seed companies, we actually buy very little. We have lots of commercially packaged seed from prior gardening years. We are also fairly good seed savers with much of the saved seed coming from heirloom & non-hybrid vegetable varieties. This means that we will see fairly consistent results from the seeds that we collect each year.

Last year, we grew groundcherries for the first time. Related to the tomato, the plants were started in the greenhouse and did very well in our soil. Those seeds were the result of a particularly wonderful seed swap that we do with an internet friend in Wyoming.

We have seeds to grow the things that we like to eat & some for things that we don't!  Unloved seeds, like okra and rutabaga, are traded away to people that actually (shudder) like to eat them. Seed swaps are an excellent way to taste test new veggies and to see if they will do well in your type of soil.

Each year, we decide to try a few new varieties of something but we try to spend exactly $26. Why $26? Because many of the seed companies offer free shipping or discount coupons redeemable on purchases over $25. A good portion of that $26 is spent on permaculture. Things that we can plant once and reap the harvest from for a number of years. Though I love to garden, I really don't like to work so hard at it!

Winter is coming on here at our Arizona desert homestead and, even though the temperatures are dropping, we still look forward to eating fresh kale, chard, escarole, lettuce, and other fresh hardy produce all winter long with the aid of a mini-hoop house. Don’t be misled by the fact that our homestead is in the southeastern Arizona desert. Last year, one storm dropped six inches of snow on our place. The following week, another cold front brought our temperatures here at the Bear Cave down to 2⁰ F here at our 5,000 ft elevation. Down in the valley, it was below zero. It certainly gets cold enough here to zap most tender growing garden plants without some protection.

Last year, we simply protected as well as we could with row cover. We found that without supports, heavy frost and snow broke down some of the plants under the row cover. While it probably didn’t hurt the nutritional value when we used them immediately, we really felt sad about the squashed greens. They looked pretty pathetic.

So this year, we decided to give them another layer of protection. Our neighbor had done some plumbing in a new out-building and had left a small pile of scrap 3/4" PVC out behind his shop. Our Arizona sun had baked the pieces for a number of months and they were definitely too brittle to make a hoop. Enter the PVC angled joints. With a few PVC fittings, a pair of 45⁰ and one 90⁰, we had our own version of a hoop for our mini-greenhouse. By repeating this five times, we had the supports for our mini-greenhouse.

Barbara, our resident math expert (among so many other things), drew out a plan using the width of our raised bed as the length of the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle that was then used to calculate the length of the top or diagonal  sections of our “hoop”. In the above drawing, the diagonals were cut at 31".

This calculation gave me a very accurate measurement for the length of the angled “hoop” sections. This resulted in the top sections of PVC being cut to 31” based on the 43” outside width of the raised bed. We determined the rise of the “hoop” by estimating the height of the greens at the edge of the raised bed. In our case, we made the side pieces 14” high.

We assembled five of these hoops to give us a mini-greenhouse with supports every 2 ½’. We dry-fit the joints for convenient dis-assembly and storage next summer

We drove pieces of  rebar into the ground at the outer edge of the bed and slipped the end of the PVC hoop over it. We then tied the PVC hoop to the raised bed with plumbers tape and a couple short sheet rock screws. Besides allowing us to level the tops, this seems to support the hoops well enough to handle both the weight of the plastic cover and the persistent wind we have here. 

We cut off a section of 10’ wide 6 mil plastic long enough to enclose the ends of the structure. The fold in the plastic at the center made it easy to mark and reinforce the tie-off spots with 10 mil PVC tape that we had left over from running our propane line from the tank to the house. We punched two sets of holes in the tape and plastic to create a make-do grommet.

Two sections of light cotton line tied with the ends out on one side and in on the other made a system that allows us to tie up either one side or both sides for picking produce or working in the garden.

On the coldest nights, we raise one side of the plastic and lay in row cover directly on the tops of the plant and roll down and anchor the plastic on both sides.  With the plastic shelter above, we don’t worry about frost, snow, or heavy rain on the row cover flattening our greens. The double layer is a bit like putting a down comforter on the bed on a cold night.

This is a picture of the payoff. Yesterday, Barbara opened the mini-greenhouse and picked a few carrots and some chard to put in our turkey and dumplings. What a great finale to a Thanksgiving turkey feed and a great reward for the work of building our little hoop house.

We are constantly looking for ways to improve the way we build and garden.  Many of you have offered great suggestions. We hope some of you will benefit by the mini-greenhouse plans we have shared. We invite you to visit us at www.grow-cook-eat-beans.com for more about our desert homestead experience.

It is mid-November and most of the gardeners I know have pulled up the last of their crops, turned the soil over and put the garden to bed until spring. Last year I did the same. This year I decided I wasn’t ready to quit yet.

I had been doing some reading on cold frames and greenhouses. Then I picked up a copy of the Winter Harvest Handbook, found that many root crops and some leafy greens will grow in the cold of winter and I decided I could do this: I’d just have to do it the mountain man way.

All of the instructions I’d seen on building a normal greenhouse start with “find a flat, level spot…” I have no flat, level spots. But I had installed 4’x4’ raised garden boxes as a way to keep my crops from washing down the hillside every time it rained hard. Could I not simply build on that? The following was my solution.

Allow me to preface this with the disclaimer that I am not a master gardener, nor a greenhouse engineer. At this point the whole thing is newly built and untried. I’ll be happy to let you know if it works out (or not) as we go along.

My idea was to build mini-greenhouses that will fit over my garden boxes to protect the plants inside from damaging winds and snow. The Winter Harvest Handbook – written by Elliot Coleman who runs a year-round farm in Maine – offers a whole list of vegetables that will grow in cold weather and many helpful tips on winter gardening without hot houses (heated greenhouses). The big thing is to protect them from the wind. And by retaining some solar heat on nice days, the plants will grow a little better than if left exposed to the normal winter temps. Requirements for me were keeping the cost down, keeping complexity down, and making them easy to either re-purpose in the spring or break down and store compactly.

I decided to use ½” ID PVC tubing because it’s light weight, flexible, and inexpensive. This design uses tubing and Tees, some plastic sheeting and duct tape. Getting the measurements for all the pieces was the hardest part. Once I had those worked out cutting the tubing to length and assembling the frames took only a few minutes per house.

  I did build a fixture on my work bench that holds a couple of the sockets (made from 1” PVC) that go in the corners of the garden boxes at precisely the right distance apart to help me assemble the frames. Most of this is not difficult at all, but bending the hoops that for the top and plugging them into the leg and rail assembly proved to be a challenge if they were left loose.

Cut the 6 10 foot long sticks of tubing to the lengths needed for the framing parts, and assemble the Tees to form the connectors. I used no glue in assembling these hoop houses so I could make adjustments if needed now, and could dismantle them for storage next spring. Where tensions threaten to pop joints apart I use a piece of duct tape wrapped around the connector(s) and tube.

  Assembling the frame goes very quickly. There is one critical factor that must be remembered during frame construction – especially if you are using glue: take it outside before the final assembly! At almost 4’ square and over 3’ high, the frame will not fit through many doors. I assembled the end frames and covered them with plastic, and assembled the center hoop and side rails then took the three pieces outside to do the final assembly and apply the top cover.

I used 4 mil clear plastic sheeting that I bought at Lowes. I wanted UV resistant plastic, but that wasn’t available locally and mail ordering it would delay this project by 2 to 3 weeks. Since I will probably tear the plastic up when I remove it next spring, it may not matter if it doesn’t last more than one year. I fasten the plastic to the tubing with good quality, exterior rated duct tape. Not classy looking, but effective.

I used my garden tractor and cart to transport each hoop house from the workshop down to the garden. They are not heavy – weighing just a few pounds – but are fairly bulky and tricky to carry very far. Marie said it looked like I had built a covered wagon and was heading “out west”.

 The “legs” on each corner slide down into the sockets to hold the frame in place on the garden box. Lifting it enough to clear the legs and tipping the cover back makes a simple way to access the plants inside. I will need to rig a method of tying down the frame so it isn’t lifted off and blown away in high winds. There is enough friction and tension in the foot-socket system to hold well in moderate breezes.

I built enough hoop houses to cover all six of my garden boxes, although I may not plant in all of them. At the moment I have carrots, spinach, chard, onions, garlic, mesclun lettuce, leaf lettuce, Brussels sprouts, thyme, rosemary, sage and oregano planted and growing. Each will grow slowly in the colder temperatures, so I’m stagger planting my crops hoping for stepped harvests through the winter. I may add turnips and beets.

New plantings will have to be sprouted indoors and the seedlings transferred to the hoop houses because the seeds will not germinate in the cold ground. But once sprouted, they will grow and provide us with fresh vegetables.

If this experiment works out, I plan to produce a small book to serve as an illustrated guide with exact dimensions, processes and tips on building these hoop houses. I may even offer pre-cut parts as kits for those without the proper tools. My rough figure is that I put less than $20 worth of materials into each of these houses, all total. Since they can be knocked down and stored for the summer and re-used for many years, only having to replace the plastic ($4 per house) that’s not bad at all. And I do have the option of covering the frames with chicken wire (excuse me… poultry mesh) and using them to keep pests out of my plants during the summer instead of using my practically ineffective perimeter fence. This fence keeps the dogs and deer out, but the rabbits run right through it. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know what issues turn up and how I address them. If you are a greenhouse expert and care to whisper in my ear about problems I can expect, that would be greatly appreciated.

This structure might look a little unsightly to the casual observer, particularly in its current unfinished state. To me, it’s gorgeous because it represents ... TOMATOES!!! Lots and lots of tomatoes. 

My neighbor, Ken Krause, has studied the market, tested the waters and jumped in to the heirloom tomato business this spring. The hoop house (also known as a high-tunnel greenhouse, I believe) will give him a jump-start on the tomatoes’ life-cycle, free of disruption by Kansas’ wacky spring and early summer weather. Aforementioned weather can include, but is not limited to, snow, sleet, wind, frost, hot sun, and rain that dumps out of the sky all at once instead of pattering gently on the landscape.

It was the latter that has kept the hoop house in this state of construction for more than a week. Last Thursday the skies opened and, off and on for several hours, “rain bands” whooshed through. They seemed more like flood bands because they absolutely drenched the landscape, then drenched it again and again.

I should have taken some photos the next day but I would have had to wear hip waders.  The row boat, which is usually moored on a little dock on the north side of the big pond, ended up in the second row of trees in the orchard – on the south side of the pond. 

What this meant for the hoop house project was essentially a standstill because the ground was so soaked that even a ladder would sink into the muck – and don’t even think about what the cherry-picker would do in all that mud and mire. 

The weather’s given us a little break this week, however, and the guys are supposed to be back today to finish putting the plastic over the high tunnel’s ribs. Good thing – a couple hundred little baby tomato plants arrived yesterday and they won’t live forever on top of Nancy’s big freezer.

A greenhouse has always been on my list. You know the list I speak of, everyone has one. It is the mental list that we all keep of things we would like to have someday. That “someday” came for me when my husband suggested we go ahead and put up a greenhouse.

I was extremely excited with the thought of being able to get a jumpstart on our gardening, and experimenting with different plants and flowers, but I also knew we needed to be economical about it. We couldn’t afford to incur a large expense in the construction of the greenhouse, or in the heating of it later. This sent me on the path of the internet highway to do some research. As you can imagine, I found lots of information on all kinds of greenhouses. There is everything from prefabricated kits that come with everything you need to instructions on building your own greenhouse out of many different materials. What I found that caught my attention the most was information on a thermal mass greenhouse. This type of greenhouse uses energy from the sun to store heat, and then release that heat at night when it is needed. Energy from the sun = free, just the right price!

According to the information I found, many things can be used for the “mass” to collect the heat and energy from the sun. Anything that retains heat would probably work. Some of the items listed included soil in raised beds, wood, block or brick foundations, concrete, or even the floor of the greenhouse. But the most effective and least expensive thermal mass is water! Again, water = free! It didn’t take much for me to decide that a thermal mass greenhouse was the way to go for us. But how would we store the large amounts of water that would be needed? The recommended amount was about 2-3 gallons of water per square foot. Apparently, a common practice is to store the water in containers along the back wall of the greenhouse, or use 55 gallon drums filled with water to support the benches in the greenhouse. In one instance I read about, someone had used the method of water in barrels under their benches. They said it kept the temperatures in the greenhouse above freezing except on the very coldest nights. On those nights, they used a very small space heater as a supplement to keep the temperatures up.

My husband and I have a great setup to use this type of greenhouse. Our basement wall is underground on three sides. The fourth side is exposed and faces in a southeastern direction. We came up with a plan to use the face of the exposed basement wall as the back wall of our greenhouse. It would face the right way to capture the heat from the sun. The block wall in the back could store some of the sun’s energy, and we would also use barrels of water on both sides of the greenhouse with planking across the tops of the barrels as bench tops. The wall we wanted to put the greenhouse against has a window into the basement. I thought we could also use this to our advantage. We heat our home with a woodstove in our basement. This keeps our basement nice and warm too. If we built the greenhouse around that window, then on the coldest nights, we could open the window and use a small fan to pull some of the heat from the basement into the greenhouse as a supplemental heating source. I was excited to test all this and see if it would work!

We began construction in March. We decided to make the greenhouse 8 feet deep by 24 feet long. My husband was the brains behind all the measurements. He came up with all the figures and sizes for making the correct cuts, and attaching the greenhouse to our basement wall. With some help from our son, my greenhouse soon started to take shape. It wasn’t long till we had a frame in place.

We knew that it was also important to have a way to let some of the heat escape when the temperatures got too hot, so we put a window in on the parallel wall to the door opening on the shorter 8-foot wall. This would correspond with the predominant wind flow here, so we could open the window and door and have air move through.

Finally the framing was completed. Now, we were ready to wrap the greenhouse with plastic. This was the one thing that we would later realize we should have done differently. We wrapped the greenhouse, roof and sides, with the plastic. Dancing in the streets, laughter, and applause … MY GREENHOUSE WAS READY TO USE ... well, almost!

We still had to get the “thermal mass.” This is where my wonderful son-in-law, Deron, comes into play. Where he works, he has access to large, 55 gallon black plastic barrels. The company he works for gets them full of alcohol for sterilization purposes. He was able to get the empty used barrels for me for free! I LOVE FREE! We set the barrels along both the outer and inner long, 24-foot walls, and filled them with water. We then used planking a crossed the tops of the barrels to act as my bench tops. Now, I was ready to start planting. Since we were already into March, I wasn’t sure if we could really accurately determine how the greenhouse would do in colder weather, and I thought I was getting a late start in getting seeds in the ground to be able to transplant for planting time. It turned out that timing for transplanting was perfectly fine by starting my seeds in March. For the most part, everything had plenty of time to sprout and grow to size for transplanting into the garden.

We installed one of those thermometers in the greenhouse that has an extra unit that we could put in our house. This way we could monitor the temperature of the greenhouse from inside our home.

On average, the temperatures inside the greenhouse stayed a good ten degrees or more than the temperatures outside, overnight, with no extra heat source. As soon as the sun would come up, the temperature would raise substantially higher than outside. There were only a couple of nights that we opened our basement window to the greenhouse, to let in a little extra heat.

I consider this greenhouse almost a complete success. The one thing that was a problem for us would not be a problem for most people. When we bought the plastic to wrap our greenhouse, we did not take into account the fact that we have free roaming poultry! Here is an interesting little tidbit for you. Ducks and chickens LOVE to poke holes in plastic! Till the end of the growing season, the plastic on the greenhouse was pretty much done for! This is simply what I call a live and learn experience! We now need to rewrap the greenhouse with plastic. We will either use a higher grade of plastic, or use plastic sheeting. That will be determined by cost right now. Either way, we are planning a very large fenced poultry enclosure, so we shouldn’t have to worry about the same thing happening again.

All in all, I would recommend this type of greenhouse, but, beware of ducks and chickens!