The Kitchen Garden Company

It has been hovering around freezing here for over a week, and there has been a mixture of gale force winds, rain and crystal blue skies. But none of that has stopped progress with the Polytunnel. This past week found me braving frostbite to haul in several wheelburrow loads into the tunnel to improve the quality of the soil.

The ground where I built the tunnel has been field for a while. In the past we had blueberries planted there and some strawberries for a while. It has also been used as a chicken run and used to be the path to a compost heap. However the soil wasn’t that great.

After stripping the grass off the surface I was faced with a mix of okay loam and heavy clay. Since the tunnel has kept the ground nice and warm even though the earth is frozen outside, I made my move. Several weeks ago, before the tunnel was covered, I turned in as much chicken manure and compost as I could at the time. This week, to help break up the heavy clay I hauled in 6 wheelburrow loads of sand. For the rest of the tunnel I wheeled in 4 loads–all I had left–of my homemade compost and then 1 large load of all the rabbit manure I could scrape from under their cages. I tilled all this in and raked it over until the soil looked very lush. It is still heavy in places and I have a lot of rocks and sticks to remove, but I am more confident about planting in it.

It is a quicker turn-around than I like. I would rather have prepared the soil last fall and given it time to mature over winter. However, the chicken and rabbit manure should both break down quickly and all the compost, filled with worms, should rapidly improve the soil. The sand has lightened the clay up considerably.

The final thing I did before planting was sprinkle some Bokashi over the surface to help energize the bioactive levels of the soil.

Technorati Tags: bokashi, polytunnel, soil improvement, gardening, spring, planting

Popularity: 19% [?]

Over the past week I’ve had a bit of a chance to work on the polytunnel. Now that the seeds have arrived there is more incentive than ever to move the project along.

This past weeks efforts have included adding a baseboard along the outside, beginning to frame in doorways, anchoring the ribs to the baseboard, revising the ridge detail and tilling the ground inside.

In the next week I am hoping to finish the minor details and perhaps next weekend–weather permitting–stretch the visqueen over the whole thing. It is still very windy at the moment and today it is especially cold. Neither condition of which will work for unrolling the covering.

You can read & see more photos here. The full set of photos is here.

Popularity: 16% [?]

This past weekend saw the beginning of our first polytunnel. The project will be documented in pictures here, so keep checking back.

As DIY projects go this one is fairly easy to tackle and the materials are simple to come by. I scoured the web for ideas and never quite came up with what I wanted–that is until last night when I found this. Almost the same design as the one I am creating, but smaller.

As I worked on the tunnel I found the materials–pvc water pipe–has some limitations, like the couplings are easy to break and if you’re not going to use glue (we want to be able to take this down and move it possibly with in year) than you’d better use something like Duct Tape to hold the joints together as you assemble things.

Also, site prep is important. We are limited in choice for locations–it is pretty much where we put the thing or no where. However, a flat, level surface would be nice. Short of getting a tractor in and grading the ground–which it is too wet for and the location is a bit tight–we were stuck with a sloped and dippy spot.

After the perimiter was staked out and lined it was really a simple matter of driving in rebar stakes, plonking on pipe and flexing it into the unions.

Be sure to read more about it, and view the photos here.

Popularity: 12% [?]