Now that some server issues seem to have been fixed, I can finally post some of the things we’ve been working on.  Besides taking care of chickens during our first cold weather blast of the season, we’ve been gardening.

The grasshopper horde was so disastrous to our garden that I didn’t even want to post any photos of the garden during the spring and summer.  Despite the chickens and some other measures, the locusts ate nearly everything.  We managed to get a few tomatoes and squash from the garden, but that was about it.  And now that it is December, I am even more frustrated that there are STILL some grasshoppers out there that have munched on our winter garden seedlings!  You’d think they would have died by now, but no.  I think grasshoppers are probably like roaches and could come out of a nuclear blast unscathed.  *picture me tearing my hair out* 

We’ve been wanting to try winter gardening after reading articles in magazines like Mother Earth News, Grit, and Hobby Farms.  Especially when the articles showcase someone doing winter gardening farther north of us.  After all, it is not unusual to have 70-80 degree days in December, January, and February here in Texas – so surely we should be able to grow SOMETHING.

Winter gardening in a location that gets cold weather requires some sort of greenhouse.  We decided to go with hoops over our existing garden beds.  There are lots of tips on making really cheap hoops but they didn’t fit what we were looking for.  Trying to work against time covering plants while a cold-front rolls in, or getting the plastic off the plants quickly, before a warm winter sun turns plants into French-fries, meant that many cheaper hoop setups was not going to work for us.  We also wanted the ability to use the hoops year round, since we again saw that without shade, the plants had great difficulty surviving the summer heat and sun.  Then there is the possibility that we may start covering plants with netting and hand-pollinating until we can get the locust plague under control.   With all of our desires in mind, we finally found a hoop design that was worth trying.

The hoop plans we chose came from an article in Grit magazine.  A system of retractable hoops on raised beds.  While this system is not the cheapest way I’ve seen people make hoops, the cost was not that expensive.  Especially considering that these hoops have the potential to decrease our summer crop losses while extending the growing season even longer.

We couldn’t find the aluminum tubing the plans called for, but they had 5 ft long sections of PEX tubing at the store that only cost a couple bucks and did the job of holding up the railing just fine when cut down to 1/2 inch long.  The store did have some T pieces that already had the bottoms cut off of them, but they weren’t the pipe size that we needed, so hubby used the table saw to cut the pieces out of regular pipe Ts so the hoops could glide along the rails.  Bending a 10ft section of pipe yielded hoops that are approximately 4 ft tall and 4 ft wide.  In order to have taller hoops on one of the beds, we pieced together pipe lengths that gave us approximately 6 feet of head space inside the tall hoop structure.

For our first winter planting I chose cool weather crops and seeds that said they could be sowed in the fall – kale, broccoli, parsnips, spinach, lettuce, arugula, cabbage, mustard greens, carrots, quinoa, cucumbers, beans, sugar snap peas, and snow peas.

Unfortunately the quinoa I planted has never really come up at all.  There are a few sprouts where it was seeded, but having never grown quinoa before, I can’t tell if they are weeds or quinoa.  But there is definitely not as many sprouts in that section of the garden compared to the number of seeds that were planted.

Even though the cucumbers and beans said they could be planted in fall, they did not survive the first night of cold weather in the 30s.  If I had closed the plastic end flaps on the hoop houses, they may have survived, so I’ll have to try it again next year and make sure that the hoop houses are closed up anytime it gets below about 40 degrees at night.  And I think that separating cool weather and warm weather crops would work better.

The kale, broccoli, and spinach are apparently the grasshoppers’ favorites.  There are still a few seedlings left, but most have been munched to death.  I had hoped to reseed, but found that I did not have any of those seeds left and none in the stores either.  Even in Texas, gardening in winter is not popular enough for local stores to carry seeds.

The arugula and mustard greens are thriving well.  The cabbage and lettuce are picking up now, with sloooooooooowwwwww but steady growth seen in the carrots and parsnips.  The pea plants look good, although I don’t think they are growing like they would if the weather had been warmer in November.  But considering we had some hard freezes in the middle of November, I probably shouldn’t complain too much about the peas since at least they are still alive.

Of course few things around here are ever easy and we have discovered a some problems with our hoop system.

Hubby swears that the man who developed this system either had a terrific wind break or lives somewhere that has very little wind.  Once you put on the plastic over the hoops, they become giant sails.  Twice now the hoops have been ripped off the rails by heavy winds.  Even though we had added lines attached to stakes in the ground, a heavy thunderstorm preceding an arctic cold front managed to snap the stakes at ground level and bring down several of the hoop structures.  We’ve since added more lines and stakes in different spots to try to counteract both heavy north/northeast winds as well as heavy Gulf winds coming from the south.  So far so good with this latest attempt at staking.

Another problem is attaching the plastic to the hoops using screws and washers.  Screws hold the plastic to the hoop frames, but it is a bit hard on the fingers when moving the hoops along the rails to cover/uncover the beds if you grab an exposed screw tip.  We have since ordered some Snap Clamps that we’ll use next time, but it’s a bit too much work to take out all those screws now, so we’ll wait until we change over to shade cloth to use clamps on all the hoops.  We have used the newly obtained clamps to hold the plastic end flaps down and they worked great even with high wind pressure on them.  Hopefully the clamps will do as well when it is hot and the plastic becomes more flexible.

We also had problems with the weight of the rails and hoops.  To save the cost of using 2x4s, the raised beds were built from 1x4s.  The added weight of the rails and the hoops has caused the boards to flex outward in the middle of the beds.  This interferes with the hoops gliding on the rails so that each T piece has to be moved individually when covering/uncovering the bed, rather than using the curtain-like string system that the plans originally called for.  We’re now considering options to reinforce the frames with scrap lumber to keep the beds’ wooden frames from flexing outward.

Another problem we encountered was the weight of the hoops being too heavy when pushed completely off the planting area and stored on the end portion of the rail system.  We countered this by cutting into the middle of the 4 ft wide end rail and placing a pipe T with a section of pipe going to the ground to support the storage end of the rail system.

It’s hard to plan for every variable, so as we’ve had weather changes over the last month, we’ve been able to see what works and what doesn’t.  Once we have all the “tweaking” done, I think this garden hoop system is going to be a smoother system.  But even now, I’ve been pleased with the overall outcome.  I’m looking forward to seeing if we can actually figure out this winter gardening thing and come out with some nice winter greens for us and the chickens.

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