Low Tunnels, Gothic Style
I am not going to have patience until it is sold in stores. Gardening, farming are supposed to be great teachers of this virtue, but alas I fall short.
And on what felt like January 79th, actually January 29th, I decided that I needed to usher spring in a little sooner. I decided to execute my hastily researched plans to create diy low tunnels to cover my raised beds. My ambitious planting calendar, covered in color-coded sticky notes, gave its approval.
Here is a little context on low tunnels. They are mini-greenhouses that cover cultivated beds to protect the soil and plants from cold. They are meant to look like this:
Low Tunnel Hoop House. Image courtesy of frogchorusfarm
Even though I had planted flowers that tolerate, even demand cold weather, I still wanted more.
I headed to my local hardware store, looking forward to greeting the two guys who own it. At the same time, I am preparing myself to sound like I know what I am doing. The phrases “¾ inch diameters, 4 foot sections” tumble through my head. I managed to secure several lengths of PVC pipe to bend over my raised beds, some metal rods to stick into the soil, and remind the gentleman that helped me that I grow flowers, “Ya viene el Día de las Madres.” (Mother’s Day is coming!) Walking with 10ft pipes sticking out of my IKEA bag filled me with a jaunty sense of confidence.
Assembling my low tunnels quickly challenged that feeling. I struggled to use my tin snips (heavy duty scissors) to even score the pipes. After lots of scraping, snapping, and cursing, I had equal pieces of pipe. With the metal rods in the ground, it was Tunnel Time. Slipping the pipes over the metal rods and then curving them over gave my confidence another check, this time akin to instagram vs. real life. What should have been gentle slopes, were steep and tall. Instead of small slopes, I had gone in a gothic cathedral direction. I live for drama.
This task was completed with attaching plastic sheeting during a wind advisory, which can only be described as peak physical comedy for the entertainment of my neighbors. And perhaps the stray cats I chase out of my flower beds.
With their unusual shape, snow and ice easily falls off. And my soil thermometers, that I check several times a day, tell me the soil is slowly but surely warming. I had never done a project like this before. But I pulled it off.
I am proud of what I can build with my own two hands.
I encourage you, reader, to be impatient, and leap head first into something never done before.