My two hoop buildings are going to be 12 by 16 and 8 by 12 or 16. My wife thinks I am crazy and I want to prove her wrong! I know that this is going to work, but any help will be appreciated.

I have read that it is possible to do this. The only real expense I have is the plastic and my time. I have been able to round up the supplies, for free, or I have left over supplies to build them.

Around here, very few people have tomatoes to sell before July 4th. Last year, I pushed it and was able to sell a few tomatoes on the 6th. This was the first day of our market. I got starting date of the market to move up to the 21st of June this year. I want to try to capture a larger part of the early market. I also want to start gaining customers earlier. I have a large base of loyal customers, but I want to grow my piece of the market.

Janet

We still have 2' of hard pack snow on the ground. The soil temp in my gh was 40° first thing this morning. The overnight low was 9°. I don't have anything planted in the spot I've stuck the thermometer so there isn't any row cover. I haven't put down the black plastic yet. At 3 pm the soil temp was 60°. There's a 2° gain over yesterday's temp. We have snow in tomorrow's forecast so there won't be much sun after early morning. I expect the soil to lose those 2°. Start keeping track of your soil temperature now and find out what soil temperature tomatoes and cucumbers need before being transplanted.

I started tomato, eggplant and pepper seeds today. They'll be transplanted in late April, about five weeks earlier than the plants that will be planted in the open field. If the soil warms sooner I'll transplant sooner. Depending on how the lettuces, spinach, beet greens and other greens are doing, I might pull them ahead of time and put down IRT to help warm the soil. I'll see what's what when the time comes. This will be the earliest I've been able to plant warm crops so I'm winging it this year.

I'll start the seeds for European cucumbers three weeks before I plan to transplant them.

If it gets too cold outside you can wrap your transplant in heavy weight floating row cover to help keep the warmth in. I'll wrap a layer of IRT over the row cover before that drop to help add warmth. The dark color of the IRT will help. I let the seedling house where my tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings are growing go down to 40° overnight. I prefer 45° but sometimes I miscalculate the heater in the seedling house.

Are you going to use your hoops during the winter? We've eaten fresh greens all winter. What a treat! It took very little time over the winter to tend to the greens.

I have had really good luck with getting melons (cantaloupe, galia, charentais), cucumbers, zucchini early from hoop houses. Strawberries have been another real winner for us. We put hoop houses over the berry beds in Feb or March and that gets them to flower 6 to 8 weeks early and we start getting everbearing strawberries in late April.

I have found it is better to put hoop houses over tomatoes in Sept. to extend the season into November/December.

Our hoop houses are 24' x 50' or 100' lengths.

You should check out http://www.hightunnels.org out of KSU. Loads of information and lots of invites to trials and tours around Kansas.

The high tunnel was great this year. I had tons of rough weather, but it survived (with a few stitches!) I grew 35 tomatoes in it and sold 700 pounds of tomatoes off of them. I started picking on July 4th and went through August. I could of had them earlier if I suckered them. I was selling them for $3.00 a pound for 3 weeks then went down to $2.50.

I am going to do it again next year!

Jay

I did not use a kit, I used a plans and modified it to fit my needs and supply budget. I do not heat it. I did add some heat when the temp dropped down to 28 outside. It was a very strange spring. Even with the 28 outside, in never got below 40 inside.

Jay