From the looks of things, our solar greenhouse whelped a litter of young! Three babies to be exact, and they're having a fine time out on our front lawn as you can see from the photos here (click on any of these images to see a larger version launch in a separate window).

As you may remember back on December 6, I posted an outdoor winter growing update following our first snow -- 4" of somewhat wet stuff (see it here: http://www.concordma.com/blog/2009/12/whats-growing-outside-in-early-december.html).  It was a real pain to be cleaning up after the snow-crushed wire wickets that we had used to hold up the floating row cover. The plants were damaged by the weight of the snow and at the points of injury became frost-burned.

At that point, I realized clearly it was not acceptable to use such dinky wire supports. But did we do anything about it? NO!  The next snow came and not only was it deeper, but it rained immediately afterwards, and it became veeeery heavy. More injury, more frosted plants.  At the time I cleared the sopping wet snow from one off the three beds in front of the house (never mind the two covered ones behind!) and was so tired and sopping wet that I quit. It wasn't until yesterday that we created the stronger solution that you see pictured here -- often referred to as "low tunnels" (a greenhouse or hoophouse being called a "high tunnel"). 

So, if you are thinking of growing vegetables outdoors in winter, please raise your right hand, placing your left on the religious book of your choice.  Repeat after me: "I swear to never use dinky wire supports during snow season." If you can't promise this, don't bother trying winter gardening in a snowy place: you will end up with the same damaged plants we did. 

Here's what we built (and we owe this mainly to Eliot Coleman, author of

The Winter Harvest Handbook

and other amazingly helpful titles). Using a pipe bender my husband constructed just for the occasion (it's dark out now; I will get a photo of that tomorrow), he bent 10' lengths of electrical conduit to fit across our 4' beds.  Inserted about 9-12" in the ground, these formed the hoops you see here. Next came the yellow rope wound around and stretched across the center top of each hoop to prevent in-between sagging. Then the floating row cover, and on top of that the layer of clear plastic sheeting. These were both weighted down by lengths of rebar and rocks when we ran out of rebar. (I'm afraid to admit that tiny festive holiday lights came next, but after the photos here were taken!)

By the way: I used the bed cleared of the second snow and the beds uncleared as an experiment. Would the insulation value of the snow outweigh the crush damage of that same snow? After uncovering all three beds (including digging out the snow-covered ones), I can state that the crushing by the heavy snow was more injurious to the plants. The bed that was covered only by a layer of floating row cover showed less injury, even when comparing the same species of plants that had been sowed at the same time. Perhaps had it not rained immediately following that last snow the story might have  been different.

Now: onward to overnight temperatures in the low teens and single digits! (Photos below are of the plants following our second crushing snow; I fully exposed them only to construct the low tunnels you see here.)




Photos: © 2009 Deborah Bier