Now that all the root crops are washed and harvested, Farmer Ryan and I have been working hard to make progress on our latest hoophouse construction project. We got the ground posts in earlier this week, which is always a much bigger project than one might expect. When my kids complain that they will never use algebra or geometry in "real life" I always like to point out situations that I use that kind of math here on the farm. Like setting up a square foundation for a hoophouse - who still remembers the pythagorean theorm ("1-2-square root of 3" right triangle rule) from 7th grade?? I do! While I confess to like math, I must admit I still fight to make things square and level on a regular basis - and square and level usually lose.... Thankfully, with hoophouses, being off by half an inch here or there is no big deal - it's a big ag building covered with a giant plastic sheet, and the tomatoes have never complained. As my father-in law likes to say - "Looks fine to me - ya can't see it from my house!"
We started putting in the ground posts earlier this week before the latest round of snow came. The wind was wild on Tuesday, blasting us with dirt and gusting over 20 mph all day. You can see the small hoophouse to the right took some damage, so we had to change our focus for a few hours to secure that plastic before it got much worse. Then it was back to setting posts. Setting posts can be a physically grueling task - pounding steel into the ground with your body is no joke. In total, there's 50 posts to set for the side walls, each one nearly 3 feet into the ground, for a 30' wide by 100' long hoophouse. Ouch. This time we used the loader to push the posts in as far as we could, saving quite a bit of pounding. Once they were in most of the way (shown in the pic above), we used a line to level them and only had to pound the last foot or so into the ground. Still, that's some honest hard work, and my body is thankful that this will likely be the last hoophouse we need to build here!
Another labor saving trick we employed on this project was to stake out markers where clamps needed to be attached when building the bows. That way we could just lay out the pieces of each arch without having to measure every one and mark where the trusses would attach. It turned out to be a great system that saved us a pile of time and made sure each truss was identical to the next during the construction. I am grateful that we were able to get that part done without snow on the ground! Once the ground posts were in place and the arches were all built, we lifted them into place one by one on Thursday morning with the tractor, and it's finally starting to look like a hoophouse now! Today we'll be working on hip boards (they go along the side where the arch bends, and will help hold down the big cover as well as the side walls that roll up and down for ventilation) and the support purlins (3 sections of pipe that run the full 100' length of the building and add additional bracing). If it gets above freezing we are gonna love it!
This new hoophouse will give us more space to rotate our summer tomato and cucumber crops through to prevent disease. Ideally, we should not plant the same crop in the same field for 2-3 years, and now we'll finally have enough space to follow those guidelines. But as you may know, our hoophouses do double duty - growing summer crops as well as fall planted winter crops, like spinach. Once this new hoophouse is in operation, we'll be able to grow even more spinach through the off season and keep your winter CSA boxes stocked with spinach on a regular basis. The first picture on this email is of the spinach that is headed out this coming week in your boxes, growing slowly but surely in hoophouse #1. Don't get me wrong - storage and root crops should be a major staple for winter cooking, but fresh greens in the winter are such a treat. Whether it's roots, fruits, or leaves you are eating this week, remember to savor the tastes of the season. And get those skis waxed up. Winter is here!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
