mid-Februaruy hoop house harvest

20 years ago

Here it is mid February in Missouri. Temperatures at night are still in the 0 to 15 degree range and daytime highs are in the thirties. BUT - inside our unheated, single layer of plastic hoophouses we are harvesting lots of wonderful stuff - lettuces, turnips, radishes, arugula, pac choi, mizuna, claytonia, baby carrots, spinach, tat-soi, mache, and so much more. We do use row cover over the plants on the below zero nights, but that's it.

Sure beats the store bought stuff!

Comments (5)

mikkle
20 years ago
Sounds great, Robbins.

When do you do your plantings for over-wintering vegies? Do you remove the plastic from your hh for the summer, grow ordinary summer crops, and then fall plant for over-wintering? or is your hh used exclusively for winter vegies?
robbins
Original Author
20 years ago
No we don't remove plastic and yes we use them all year - we grow tomatoes starting in March - also melons, beans etc to get a jump on the season. With shade cloth we are able to grow nice salad greens all summer. We also use hoop houses for cut flowers.
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20 years ago
hi robbins, i have just built a hoophouse 8x16 our favourite bean is the snap bean. is it easy to handle in a h/h or is it to bushy? i mean can it be trained up a cage like tomatoes?
thanks tinki.
robbins
Original Author
20 years ago
Tinki - I'm unsure if you mean pole or bush beans. I've grown lots of bush beans in high tunnels, but never poles. I have seen someone else do it and they had them growing up hogwire trellises and they were beautiful and productive. Give it a try.
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20 years ago
thanks robbins, i guess i do mean bush beans. i didn't think they would grow up a trellis, but if you have grown them that way, then that is good enough for me:-)
tinki