Some of our hoops and covers

I do not have trouble when planting tomatoes, peppers and eggplant since I put up the cages immediately- what I had trouble with was the beds that I direct seed. This year I am going to try setting those short cheap wire edging fence around the inside perimeter of the bed then drape bird net over and earth staple them around the outside.The cats don't eat my plants they just like the soft soil so we are thinking if they can't get to the beds easily they won't try. Can't lose anything trying.
I will take a picture as soon as they are set up.
Happy garden year Susan

cornish2175 -

You will absolutely LOVE Cornwall. Every little town has it's own personality.

Your beds are very nice. I gave up using bird netting as it entangled both snakes and birds!

Did not even give a thought about birds and snakes-don't get many- just little garden type but don't want them hurt. may have to come up with another idea.

Thanks Calallily. I'll get some 3/"4 Schedule 40 PVC and try some plastic film "tents". I used to assume PVC pipe would need support every 4-5 feet if not arched into a bow.

I want to keep the rain off and heat in with LOW tents in early spring, and then something much taller mainly for warmth in late summer and early fall (tomatoes).

Another fall "tall rain tent" application is keeping rain and drizzle off almost anything I want to collect seeds from. I can tell from my compost heap that I'm throwing away a lot of viable seeds just because the seedheads & seed pods are black and slimy with mold.

It seems to be a law of nature that seeds will be fussy and slow, or rot, in carefully prepared beds where you WANT them to sprout, but viable, vigorous, sturdy and resilient if you try to compost them. Even in winter! I never saw such thick, healthy roots and thick blanched stems pushing their way up no matter how deeply buried they are!

Honeybee, I had to rescue a huge Indogo snake that had tangled himself thru bird netting. Poor guy was a little dehydrated and when I first saw him I thought he had died. He was very happy to be free again! We have since taken down the bird netting.

Rick, I know about seeds coming up in the compost and not in the garden.
I had to cover more plants last night.. The tomatoes will be in the greenhouses if they ever get here, but for now had to be covered. I have T-posts holding up cattle panels. We put black felt over the top edge of the cattle panel, then covered with heavy frost covers and pinned the bottoms down with bricks. Worked like a giant tent. Lows were predicted to be 40-41 but it was actually 32 here and colder inland. Crazy winter, supposed to be warmer than normal but so far much cooler.
We have different length "legs" on the tent frames for varying heights of plants.

I feel your pain. I'm in Florida (8b), dripping spigots (8 of them outside), and I have my winter garden covered as well as I can with flannel sheets (fortunate that I was - however briefly - a licensed massage therapist and never throw good stuff like that away). It's supposed to hit right around 20, a record low.

-Rich

We were hoping to escape the cold winter like last year but the cold has hit hard. New Years day mid 70's but yesterday only 40's. This AM, news said 19 - water frozen in dog's bowl I forgot to bring in. Only good thing about this cold is it kills off the weeds I haven't gotten to pulling.

I have given up on the use of bird net over my seed beds- will just have to go back to using flat tomato cages over beds until seeds establish themselves.

Calalily - I'm so glad you managed to rescue the Indigo snake before it died. I was less fortunate when a beautiful Black Snake entangled itself in our bird netting. Sometime later I had to rescue a Carolina Wren from inside the netting covering our blueberry bushes. The last straw was when I rescued an Eastern King Snake!

Hubby and I dug up and threw out the bed of strawberries that had been protected by the bird netting. As to the blueberries - well perhaps the birds will thank us by leaving some for us this year ^^_^^

DH thinks I'm just too soft hearted in regards to bird netting entagling birds. But I just can't help it. After the third or fourth entangled bird to be untangled and set free I gave ours away. I printed out the part of this thread and showed it to him to prove I'm not the only one. Luckly I didn't have to untangle any large birds. One of my grandmother's favorite Thanksgiving day stories was about how my grandfather got a broken and bloody nose while trying to untangle a tom turkey from a revolving clothes-line. It was really funny, but not at the time!

Golden front woodpeckers, hooded orioles, green jays, mocking birds and sometimes grackles love our figs. I tried bird netting but the birds would go under it so we ended up wrapping the whole tree until a baby o'possumm got stuck in the netting one night. We set him free but realized the netting wasn't really worth it. I have tried tying plastic bags in the trees and mylar ribbon. Both work for a while, then the birds get used to it. Birds beat me to almost every orange and tangerine this year, so have to eventually come up with something that works.
I keep cut fruit in trees behind the house which the birds love and when I started doing so I had hoped it would keep the birds away from the fruit trees. Woody (our name for the most noisy of all the woodpeckers that come here) will complain loudly when the fruit is all gone. Still doesn't keep him from eating my figs. I saw a curved bill thrasher with a tomato in his mouth yesterday. At least it was a small cherry one! Hope he doesn't like figs too.

Calalily, A friend here slips nylon socks on her apples and peaches. Seems time consuming to me, but it's worth it to her. She went to a shoe store and told the salesperson there what she needed and that person *gave her* an entire box of those little wimpy socks they have for you to use when trying on shoes. Put on your best smile, maybe take a few garden tomatoes.....;-)

MaryMcP, I had a neighbor that did the same thing-knee high hose over the nearly ripe peaches. Worked for him, but he only had two peach trees.

Lovely hoops on all the beds. A lot of work to get them install at first but well worth the effort. I'll be interested in seeing your hoop houses when they get installed.

Nice looking raised beds.

We use a double cover method with our cold house in the winter. It allows us to winter over several greens until spring. The inner row cover is summer weight and allows for more sun light than the freeze covers. The outer cover is 6mil plastic on a PVC frame. We havn't used it yet for warm weather crops in the spring but it's an idea. We could use them on the tomatoes and peppers until it gets warm enough for them outside.

Elliot Coleman as a chart (pg 49) in his Winter Harvest Handbook that trends his data collected on planting date versus the number of days to harvest. I find it useful.

My dad built a walk through frame covered with chicken wire around all his blueberry bushes. I never saw any wildlife issues with it other than it kept them out of the blueberries.

clap clap clap clap

Mary, great idea with the nylons, except we have over 80 fruit trees! I think when the trees mature, the birds will take some fruit and leave at least part of the harvest alone.

SusanKC, definitely makes a difference in not only temperature, but day length on some things. Carrots, beets and other cooler weather crops take longer when grown in winter. Cucumbers and melons for some reason do not do well when planted from mid Nov thru Dec, but if I wait and plant after winter solstice, they do fine. One native (old timer) farmer said only plant melons when the days are increasing but Jan/Feb planted melons still take two weeks longer than March-June planted ones. Sweet potatoes finish 90-120 days and sometimes less than 90 in the heat of summer, but if planted after August will take 6 months to make a sizeable root.

The chart in Elliots book is shaped like a bell curve. Shows the same as what you are indicating, the closer items are planted to Dec (on either side) the longer it takes to grow. He's zone 5 same as I am but further north so we get more sunshine in the winter. We usually have the last pick of greens sometime shortly after Thanksgiving and they start growing again sometime the end of January. This year is warmer and we are still getting mache. The lettuce and spinach have slowed down. By March anything left in the bed will be ready to pick again.

One of my seed catalogs mentions this also, I think it is Abundant Life. When I first started growing veggies on a big scale I didn't think our daylength would make so much difference because it doesn't vary that much from season to season. On winter solstice our day length is still around 10 hours and mid summer is around 14.5 hours, but it sure does make a big difference. My neighbor said anything below 12 hours affects how her chickens lay, guess the same is true for veggies.
I had terrible germination with mache and the ones that came up are still tiny, the size of a quarter. I love the flowery taste of this green. I think our soil temperature was too high.

We had terrible winds yesterday, I had to keep replacing bricks on the leeward side of the hoops because the wind would just lift the covers and flip the bricks. Two stacked together didn't move! We are in a crazy cycle this winter, warm Thursday thru Monday then falls low enough to get light frost every single Tuesday night. The only rain we get is a drizzlle, not enough to help and dense fog on the warm nights and that makes mildew on my squash. Another cold front is predicted tomorrow, with more winds and low of 42 (if they say anything below 45, it usually gets lower this year for some reason and sometimes frosts). The national weather service predicted a warmer than normal winter. So far, they are wrong.

My greenhouses haven't arrived yet, and it is almost a month past when they were promised to be delivered.

Could be if the temps were above 70. We've been growing Vit a number of years (on a two person scale). The Vit never seemed to get very big or grow very fast. We switched to Big Seeded Mache this year. It has bigger leaves and is growing better.

Interesting it's colder there than normal. It's been warmer than usual here. Should be in the 20s and below. We're still getting 50 and 60 degree weather.

Do you all use windbreaks in TX?

Susan, Are Vit and Mache a type of lettuce? Never heard of either.

I don't know if Mache is considered a lettuce or not. It is a type of green that is also called a number of other things including corn salad. We eat it in salads/tacos and grow it as a cool/cold weather crop. I've read that you can cook with it but have not tried it that way. It doesn't seem to be as winter hardy as the spinach we plant but that might be because of the variety we've been growing. It does last longer in the cold weather (with protection) than the lettuce we've grown.

Vit is a type of Mache.

Here's a wikipedia posting on Mache. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_salad

That's very interesting about the nutrition content. I'll have to look for it, see if I can grow it here in cool months. Thanks Susan.

Calalily,

I don't know this for anything except some Brassicas, but some are sensitive not only the actual LENGTH of daylight, but also whther it is increasing or decreasing.

Thus some types do better as fall crops when daylength and temperature are both DEcreasing.

You CAN grow them in either season, but they are supposed to do better in the fall.

That depends on your definition of "lettuce". The botanists' definition would definitely exclude Mâche, which is in a different genus altogether (Lactuca vs. Valerianella). In fact, they're not even in the same plant family.

From an herbalist's or chemist's POV also they are completely dissimilar. Lactuca species have some sedative and analgesic effects attributed to lactucarium, a milky liquid secreted by the plant in response to injury. Valerianella does not have any significant physiological effects I am aware of.

From a gardener's point of view, though, their uses are similar - generally as a fresh leafy addition to salads with a generally "neutral" flavor (though true lettuce can be a little bitter). Thus the common name "Lamb's Lettuce" often applied to Mâche.

-Rich

I have wanted to make some easy to assemble and remove hoops for three beds in the greenhouse for a couple years now but I haven't done it yet. Instead of heating early, I want to put up mini hoops. I already do it for the seed house. It has a mini hoop house in side the greenhouse for double protection and I only need to heat the germination chamber early in the season and the germination chamber is 4x16.....and in the main greenhouse I have a 4x16 seedling chamber (mini greenhouse) so I don't have to heat the entire 20x96 just for the young seedlings. Anyway.....I need three mini hoop tunnels in the tomato greenhouse so I don't have to heat it during the first three weeks that the plants are in there.. Mostly gabbering outloud cause your mini hoops remind me what i keep wanting to do .....and in the garden plot for another slightly early crop of toms.

I'm just hanging around reading your stuff ....learning....soaking in new ideas. Thanks Cala....you are an inspiration.

Rick, some varieties definitely do better in fall (and some never do well here).
Cricket, a tunnel inside a high tunnel makes a lot of sense.
We had to cover tonight, predicted low of 39 and freeze warning in 3 adjoining counties. Greenhouses finally arrived but too windy today to work on them.

it was very windy and cold yesterday. I couldn't do anything outside. Everything was froze this morning. It always make me nervous to see the sight of the main greenhouse with ice ferns all over it and when I enter the greenhouse the mini hoop inside is all nice and warm and ice free.

Still slightly windy today. Hope you get your greenhouses up and goin. Have fun and happy gardening

Which clips are these please? Peaceful Valley sells several types of clips.

Thanks!

-Rich

These http://www.groworganic.com/rowcover-clamps-1-2.html

Here is a four foot length also. http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/store/pvc-scl-snap-clamp.html

Thanks you my friends. I placed orders today.

-Rich