High Tunnel – Mid Winter Wander

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Happy growing!

We had a couple of weeks that were surprisingly weirdly warm and got a lot done in that time it was pretty enjoyable it’s spooky but enjoyable to be able to make Headway on a lot of things and now it’s going back to seasonally cold cold stuff it’s not

Going to get anywhere near or above freezing for at least the next 7 to 10 days uh approaching single digits at night not quite that cold yet um but it’s it’s nippy a little bit of snow on the ground but it’s bright and sunny and

So my thoughts are to go out to the high tunnel at our neighbor’s spot and take a look at what’s been going on in there it’s been a little a little bit since I’ve gone in myself um just assess how things are growing what needs to be done

And share that process with folks that are interested so stick around it’s mid January so there is no pressure or intent to start seeds in there or get the growing season going so to speak anytime super soon although we could be starting onions in not too long a time

Early February mid-February we can think about starting AR chokes and some other annuals that need a lot of time to get going but the more I can get organized and uh get this place optimized before we need it need it to be useful to us

The better but let just pop in here it’s been a little minute certainly haven’t gone in since it dropped down last night was around 10° right now it’s around 20 outside I don’t have a thermometer with me I’ll come out and do that another time I just

Wanted to get like a qualitative feel for what’s going on out here it’s incredibly comfortably toasty in here right now um very much well above freezing and let’s see looks like so far the weather the way it’s going has not had any negative impact on the Rosemary actually looks like there’s new growth

In the last little while so that’s kind of surprising I think any day that’s slightly Sunny is enough to have the plants do a little bit of growth so that’s kind of sweet so looking at some parsley here um they are still in decent shape I feel like that

Went through a little bit of stress from the cold last night uh probably sooner than later it would not be a bad idea for me to get the low tunnel the poly over this I have it it’s just a matter of stretching it out and clipping it in

But I want to make sure that if I do put that Poly on that before I do so I come out here and I have um the solar powered fan I put this in the corner if I can find the video I’ll link to it here where I showed that it’s a

Solar panel is hung in the high tunnel here the fan is set up in the corner and then the fan takes the excess heat and sends it down into a tube buried in this walkway so I want to get all that infrastructure in place before I put the

Poly on and I also want to be thoughtful about either harvesting Rosary to dry or for propagation before that poly goes over cuz that’ll get squished also before I consider putting that poly over I’ll need to come through and harvest back this perennial kale you can see in

The fall before things got cold went through and took a bunch of cuting off of these figs just enough to get the poly over this whole scenario we took all those cuting and we put them into soil mix and put that down in The Root Cellar so hopefully we’ll get some

Propagation by heading these back I feel confident if these were under poly for the winter they would uh they would have dieback and be able to produce some pretty serious crops next year I really appreciate what this perennial kale is up to there’s a lot of it all throughout

This tunnel and it seems to do a really great job as it gets colder I think this is Hardy enough that it should be fine even if it was outside with our average Winters especially as things get warmer over time but in here it should be a Surefire bet that they can overwinter

And um we’ve been going through as time allows and adding compost and soil around the stems so that we can facilitate promote some rooting these are plants that will root anywhere the stems are in contact with soil they’ll stool layer um so that’ll give us a chance to ramp them up bring more

Outside maybe even offer them on the website at some point but most of the really big big Brasa greens you see in here are all from the original perennial kale um work that we’ve been experimenting with the Kaleidoscope kale I’ll put a link in the description to the experimental Farm Network they have

Seed for that kale along with tons of other amazing crops that you might want to check out we would do well to start harvesting more lettuce out of here I think these are starting to get a little bit beat up oop excuse me starting to

Get a little bit beat up by the cold I don’t know how much more uh they’ll be able to do and I feel like if we just waited to see what happens they probably would get injured Enough by the frost or the Deep freezing that’s happening in

Here and no longer be edible so we should probably prioritize having a couple really nice salads soon cutting them nice and low if they resprout in the spring great but um it feels like this sort of cropping system if we don’t put a little bit of a low tunnel or

Protection over them we can expect them to get damaged once the temperatures get close to single digits outside that makes sense couple parsely plants here that we put in oh boy maybe it was 2 years ago now um let them bolt and set a ton of seed I collected many ounces of

Seed probably a pint or two almost a quart of straight seed which is lovely I don’t know if these are still viable but I got tired of collecting and so I just let the rest be here I figured out whatever they can fall and do their

Thing and a nice surprise we’ll see how this works as far as will they survive all the way to the spring but I normally have a hard time getting parsley to germinate well and I think what happened is because the seed was able to drop at

Its own pace into the walkway here they just germinated some time not too long ago and they’re starting to grow so we’re going to not walk in this one walkway until spring and then hopefully have hundreds if not thousands of parsley starts that are nicely developed

That we didn’t have to do anything other than let the seed drop into a walkway in a high tunnel I’ll try to document this in more detail when uh things thought out again and there’s actual rain but right now this tank is um serving a really interesting function there’s six tanks

Just like this um way up slope all the way up our neighbors’s barn there’s a gutter up there where they collect rainwater and there’s a a a tube that runs down that I now for the winter have going directly into this tank and all those tanks are open so anytime it rains

Or the snow thaws water can freely go into this tank and you you can see there’s drilled holes here here and here that have hoses attached that go into this walkway into this garden bed over here and down and over and into this walkway over here it’s a complex seeming but a simple

Solution of anytime there’s rain coming in this tank is filled until a state of overflow and then it can equally distribute the Overflow state to multiple places that are on contour and fill them with water so after a good rain the other day I came out here and

Saw you can still see how wet it is in the walkway so the water passively goes into the walkway and it gently distributes down the entire length and it laterally um hydrates into the beds it Wick Waters into the beds right next to them so that’s a setup that I’m

Really Keen to see how it evolves and unfolds I’ll document it in real time when it’s doing it but that is another walkway that’s passively irrigated Whenever there is rain uh moving through that system and since the tanks are open up on the hill they don’t experience really intense freezing and so they

Shouldn’t be damaged but that’s a passive distribution system for water through this High tunnel it feels like a great upgrade it’s amazing what season extension like this can do I’m in my gear for outside uh and I am overheating I don’t want to overheat too much cuz I

Want to be able to go back out into the cold so I’m going to wrap this video up here let me know what sort of questions you have comments ideas suggestions what sort of crops would you like to see in here do you have some concerns about

Some approaches that I’m up to I’m interested and open to hearing about it and let me know in the comments what you’re up to this winter you in a cold place that’s getting hit with some nice cold weather or I know down south there are folks down in Virginia and Tennessee

That are seeing extremely cold unseasonably kind of scary cold how are you all handling that let’s share some notes and keep moving forward in the winter months prepping for a abundant growing season in 2024 thanks for watching