Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables From Your Home Garden All Year Long by Eliot Coleman & Kathy Bray & Barbara Damrosch

Author:Eliot Coleman & Kathy Bray & Barbara Damrosch [Coleman, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Vegetable gardening, Gardening, Vegetables, Organic gardening, Organic
ISBN: 9781890132279
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Published: 1999-09-01T17:49:20.883000+00:00

Building the Backyard Mobile Tunnel

The mobile tunnel is the perfect year-round growing structure for the colder parts of the country. In spring, it gives warm-weather crops such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers a four-week head start. In summer, with the vents and doors wide open, it provides them with slightly more tropical conditions for enhanced flavor and ripeness, an important aid in our cool, moist coastal summers. In fall, it extends the summer-crop harvest for a month or more. In winter, it covers the inner layer of protection for winter vegetables.

I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of gardens with raised beds framed by planks. They look more or less the way your cold frames would look if you put soil in them. Well, envision a bed that is 14 feet wide—the width of your greenhouse. A row of planks stands above the soil along each edge. The planks are bolted to posts driven into the ground every 4 feet. Those are the rails. The base of this greenhouse, where the hoops attach, is made of planks, as in Figure 61. The 2-by-4-foot skid on the outside edge of the baseboard slides along the top of the rail. You can wax the surface to reduce friction.

The forces on the greenhouse hoops tend to push them out at the bottom. Thus, the baseboards run inside the rails, and the natural pressure holds them in tight. The hoops are fastened to the baseboards with bolts and metal plates.A purlin connects the hoops along the top center. That is the same structure for the hoop house described earlier. You can easily adapt any home-built greenhouse to this system by incorporating the baseboards into the lower structure when you build it.

When you simplify a technology as we have done, think it through thoroughly to prevent problems before they occur. If we can move this greenhouse, so can the wind. It is almost an axiom that if the wind can blow something about, sooner or later it will. The vision of an object the size of a small house wafting skyward on a stiff breeze is unnerving. Thus, although the mobile greenhouse is simple, it is not casual. When the house is in place, we take precautions to make sure it will stay there. There are ¾-inch-diameter bolts through both the baseboard and the rail every 4 feet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.