Risa renews the straw after cleaning up the grow tunnelGrow tunnel report: we ate all the lettuce, mizuna and spinach early on, and had bok choi into December, but the three days at 8F temperatures took care of that. As usual the survivors were garlic, onions, and kale, all of which did just as well outside the tunnel. Some chard died to the ground also, and is coming back, but not eating size yet. So we regard the effort of construction as not having paid for itself so far.
A lot of hand-picking of slugs is ongoing, too. Outside the tunnel they seem to be hibernating mostly, but the eggs on the inside all hatched. They love to crawl up onto the plastic at night, where they are easily enough collected and fed to the chickens, but it's yet another chore.
The storms did throw the under-built tunnel around a bit but did not rip it down; some commercial operations actually have had more damage than we did. You can see in the image that we've tucked various kinds of struts into the roof, and braced two of the fence posts in the north wall. We also go round and tighten the wires as they stretch. The good news is that the hoops have not tried to lift out of the ground. Probably putting in more hoops would improve the appearance of things as well as add strength.
We have laid down some lettuce and chard seeds in a flat but the slugs are a concern; might have to commit to baiting them. We'd capture a couple of chickens and keep them in there for an hour or so, but they'd be just as fond of the kale as of the slugs.
It's interesting to hang out in the tunnel during a heavy rain; there is shelter, there is some warmth, the sound lulls one mightily. The temptation is to lie down in the straw, pull some of it over oneself, and dream -- to rise up, perchance, a generation hence and astonish the villagers no end.
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If you bait the slugs with beer, can the chickens have the dead drunk slugs later? Or would that be bad for them?
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of spending time in the tunnel during a rainstorm. With an LED light to read, it'd be mighty nice...especially with some hot cocoa.
What a lovely description! I want to come nap in the tunnel.
ReplyDeletePshaw, it's nastier than I made it sound! Continual condensation keeps the straw pretty damp.
ReplyDeleteActual beer not necessary. A quarter teaspoon of sugar and a bit of yeast will bring them. I don't think they can hurt the chickens if we get to this same-day. They go sour pretty fast, though ... :}
I can relate to the "weather" inside the tunnel. When I had a plastic greenhouse for seed starting, it tended to rain nearly as much inside as out. It had a pretty shallow pitch on top. Previously I had another greenhouse with a steeper roof that didn't have the same problem. The condensation ran down the slope instead of dripping off.My next one will be glass.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if you have mold issues with the damp straw?
I have started collecting windows. We're thinking we might move the operation to the south wall of the barn, displacing the Annies.
ReplyDeleteStraw seems OK sofar but we might have to rethink our garden procedures inside -- it's a very different environment, for sure, and we know way less about it than we thought.
Your comment about the windows reminds me of when we lived off the grid years ago. We found an abandoned (old) schoolbus and salvaged all the windows from it to do cold frames. The aluminum frames were nice, too, because they didn't rot from the sun or get eaten by termites (big problem here).
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