Two Feet in the Dirt

You really start to see the advantages of a hoop house when you have an ice storm one day and are putting seeds in the ground the next. While the trees and ground were still covered in a good amount of ice this morning, inside the hoop house I watched the thermometer gradually rise to 74 degrees while I prepped beds! (And that’s compared to only 29 degrees outside at the same time.) By this afternoon, we’ll have five beds planted with spring mix, arugula, baby kale, spinach, and radishes. To offer additional protection, each bed with also be covered with a layer of heavy duty row cover which will help boost the temperatures even further during the day and into the night. 

Still, yesterday’s ice wasn’t as easy to recover from as all that. We were out early in the morning and throughout the day yesterday to knock any ice off of the top of the hoop house to prevent too much weight from accumulating, which in the worst case scenario could actually cause the hoop house to cave in. Additionally, we had our first test of the deer fence, not with deer but with falling branches. The longest section of our deer fence runs right under a line of enormous pine trees and, if you’ve ever been around pine trees in ice and snow, you’ll know that they don’t handle it too well. The build-up of ice on the limbs and needles of the trees gradually got so heavy that multiple branches were leaning and resting on the fence and, worst of all, a huge branch even broke off and crashed through one section of the fence. At first glance, it appeared pretty catastrophic, but the fence actually held up as well as could be expected. The branch simply crumpled the fencing material down and all we had to do was pull everything back up and re-tighten the wire along the top that the fence hangs from. Still, hacking back icy limbs in freezing temperatures isn’t the most fun activity, making today’s toasty work in the hoop house even more enjoyable!