I have learned over the course of the last three years that there is a vast difference between having a casual hobby garden and growing food to help your family become self-sufficient and produce income for the farm. All through my childhood, when the weather started warming up, my dad would start looking at seed catalogs; we tilled the garden and got everything ready for warm weather.  When the weather finally warmed up and stayed warm, that’s when we started planting and weeding.  It was time to “play” in the garden.

It’s a little different when you are growing to feed your family and others.  At least it is for me, anyway.  I find myself thinking about the spring plants when most people are shutting down their gardens for the winter.  With the usually mild winters here in South Carolina, we can grow three gardens a year, spring/summer, fall, and winter.  It means a constant rotation of planting, seed starting, and the like.

Here on the farm, we started the seeds for many of our herbs and vegetables during the first week of January.  I know that you are thinking that it is way too early to start plants, even in South Carolina!  But I have learned a few things along the way.  Last year we started using low tunnels to cover crops that we planted, and actually had good success with it.  This year, we finally got to add our first greenhouse to the operation. 

It was made of simple construction with ¾” PVC, 6 mil plastic, and a wooden frame.  The treated wood frame was secured to the ground with posts set 3 feet deep. We gave the hoop frame more strength by placing a 10 foot piece of ½ metal conduit piping inside the top piece of the PVC assembly. 

The hoops were attached to the wooden frame with metal conduit brackets  The end hoops were attached to the base with treated 2x4s and conduit brackets.  It took two of us to install the hoops to the frame, and it went nice and quick. 

I placed two sheets of plastic over the hoops for the cover, to make an air cushion to help insulate the air inside.

 For the door, we repurposed a broken storm door by cutting it to size for the doorway.   The greenhouse measures 12 by 14 feet with a height of about 7 feet in the center. We have had our cool-spring plants inside since the beginning of February, and they are growing great.  In fact, I walked inside the greenhouse the other day and it felt like an 80-degree day.  Outside the greenhouse it was 40 degrees.  We have been able to duplicate the temperature conditions of Florida in our simple greenhouse. 

This week, we are repotting about 250 tomato seedlings into bigger trays.  Then they will be heading out to the greenhouse, to make room for more seed starts. 

We are excited about our greenhouse and how it’s performed so far.  In fact, I am already looking at building 3 more just like this one, so we can grow year-round here.  If you like the idea of eating fresh vegetables during the winter and early spring, consider building your own green house.  They don’t have to be expensive to build or very big, but they are well worth the effort.

A while back I explained my plan to extend the garden’s growing season by building  domed covers over my raised bed garden boxes and planting cold-tolerant plants.  I thought I’ll let you know how that’s going and what I’ve learned from the experience.

Fresh Vegetables in January

I planted mesclun lettuce, leaf lettuce, carrots, onions, chard, spinach, garlic, and Brussels sprouts.  On a weekly basis I’ve been able to harvest the lettuces, carrots, onions.  Chard comes in a little more slowly.  The spinach is alive but pretty well stopped in its tracks as far as growth goes.  I think this is mostly due to a lack of sunshine; which I will discuss in a moment.

  I didn’t plant more than a couple of squares of each plant because I didn’t want to be inundated.  That need not have been a worry.  We get enough each weekend to make one good salad, which will provide dinner once and provide a side salad once or twice for lunch through the week.

 My herb bed is also doing well and we can clip rosemary and oregano as needed.  The sage has gone dormant, so I don’t take cuttings from that.  I moved a basil plant into my office and that serves our needs well since I have to clip it aggressively to keep it from bolting.  I’ll plant fresh seedlings in the herb bed in the spring.

What I’ve Learned

The biggest mistake I made was in planting beds that are in a shaded area during the winter because the sun sits lower in the sky in winter than it does in summer and trees along the edge of my property block the sun.  In the summer this was not a problem.  Next year I’ll need to put in more boxes and the winter garden will be higher up the slope where full sun is received most of the day.

This lack of sun is compounded by the fact that the plastic covering the houses is semi-transparent, so it may be blocking some of the sun.  Whenever possible I go out and pull the covers off the beds on warm sunny days.

I was afraid that watering the beds would become a chore since I had to disconnect and drain the water hose for the winter.  But this has not been a problem.  Rain that falls on the cover slides down the sides and into the edges of the box.  The vermiculite in the mix then helps hold the water for the plants.  And because there are not many warm, sunny days where I pull the covers, the moisture that gets inside tends to stay there.  Evaporated moisture condenses on the inside of the cover and falls back to the soil as it gathers into droplets.  I have not had to add water even once so far.

One thing I did think to do was to make slits on the plastic where it wraps around the lower side bars.  This allows the water that runs down the sides to escape and fall back into the soil instead of building up in the pocket this wrapped plastic forms.

I have learned that there are some PVC pipe fittings that would allow me to build a “house” shaped roof rather than bending the piped into a hoop.  The hoop puts a lot of tension into the system and this can cause some problems with joints popping loose and legs not wanting to fit into their sockets.  Building domes with short straight sides and a peaked roof would take all the tension out of the system.

Conclusion

I’d say the project is a success; it is providing us with fresh food and will have a great start on the early spring crop because much of it is already in the ground.  I need to be more mindful of the suns winter position and put out more plants next year.  But it has worked well.

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.

Work on the high tunnel greenhouse continued today, after several delays due to wind. Trying to wrangle large sheets of plastic in the spring winds of Kansas isn't anyone's idea of fun.

I still wonder how aforementioned plastic is going to hold up to aforementioned wind, but other farmers in our neighborhood have these very same structures and swear by them, so we shall see.

Next: planting heirloom tomatoes! Followed eventually by eating and canning heirloom tomatoes. Yesss!

And in this photo, you'll see a certain little blonde dog busily helping the Fieldstone crew by running circles around them as they wrestled plastic. He also helped the geese get in the water by chasing them to water's edge and the cat get in the barn by charging her as she emerged to stretch in the sunshine. CP is a very helpful dog.

Photos by Nancy Krause.