The cattle panel hoophouse shown is the first design we tried and has now been in use for two winters. Cattle panels — also known as stock panels — are 16′ long X 52″ high. The price was about $15 each when we erected “Lettuce One” and they are now about $20 each. Lettuce One is 48′ long X 8′ wide and is about 6′2″ at the peak. There are two 3′ wide beds along each side and a 2′ walkway in the middle. When we put this up in the fall of ‘07, the total cost was $310. We estimate that the same one put up today would be about $400.

The end wall construction can be seen thru the plastic. There is a single eight foot 2X4 on the ground under the door that is “nailed” to the ground with two pieces of 3/8″ rebar. The door and that 2X4 and the angled braces were built flat and tipped into place. The rebar was hammered into the ground and the top of the door frame is strapped to the cattle panel.

Each panel is wired to the next one in 5 to 7 places. Wire is the green, plastic-coated clothes line available at Lowe’s — 50′ coils for about $9. Each panel is pinned to the ground with long hooks made from 4′ rebar bent into a “J”. Pound these in on a slight angle toward the center of the hoophouse so they can’t be pulled straight up.

This is enough to get you started. There are purlins running the length of the house to attach the plastic. The ‘08 improvement to this house was to attach wigglewire channel to the purlins to make the plastic attachment easier. We also moved the purlin closer to the ground so the interior drip is next to the wall and not on the plants.  Buy 12′ wide poly for the cover. The “skirts” take an additional 3′ wide piece on each side. If you buy a 100′ roll of 12′ wide (at about $130) you’ll have enough to cover the entire house and enough to cover two raised beds besides.

More tomorrow on this one and photos of the next generation– Lettuce Two.

Dev in OK
zone 7a

Cattle Panel Hoophouse - first design

Yesterday I wandered through the dead tomato plants shaking my head over all the tomatoes left behind.  I found four more good sized green ones and picked them, but it was very sad. There will be no more fresh-picked tomatoes until June 2009!

During tomato season, I have fresh tomatoes with every breakfast. I eat fried Spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and thick slices of tomato. I make spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes and peppers. There are always bowls, baskets, and plates of tomatoes in the kitchen. (Fruit flies, too, but that’s another post…) I love the colors, the shapes, the different textures of my heirlooms. I like taking mixed bags of cherry tomatoes to market. I like seeing boxes of tomatoes on my farm stand shelves and on the farmers’ market cart. I like walking through the tomato cages and plucking a fresh Sungold directly into my mouth. I like the smell of tomato plants and hot tomatoes growing in the sun.

I look up new varieties, swap seeds all over the country, and keep up with the TomatoMania Yahoo group. I take notes on how different varieties do in our hot and dry summers. I keep lists of new ones to try next year. There’s always a next year when you grow tomatoes…

I have a database of my tomato trials. Actually, I have a database for every year:  five years ago, I grew nine varieties; this year there were 73. About 350 plants.

What do we do with all of these? Sell them, can them, dry them, sun-dry them, give them away. Some trials produce little or no fruit (we’ve said goodbye to Brandywines forever), some produce enough to sell to specialty stores (love those Mini Orange and Fox Cherries!), some we grow just for our own canning (black plums) or drying (Principe de Borghese), or tomato sandwiches (Cherokee Purple). On a good day at the farmers’ markets, we can sell 100 pounds of tomatoes very easily– not that we always have that many.  They’re just so beautiful, people HAVE to buy them.

We grow beautiful food.

–Dev

We had our first frost last Thursday and frantically picked as many peppers as possible. We have (had) over 700 plants – 200+ which were grow-to-order Anaheims – so it took quite a few hours to harvest them. We didn’t even get to the Anaheim garden that day.

Yesterday I started on the Anaheim and Poblano peppers, but there are still about three bushels of Anaheims left to bring in! I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of them. We were growing these for a caterer and the fruit didn’t get large enough for their use until right at the end of the season. They’re perfect right now, of course.

We didn’t really need a blog… we really need a website. This will do for the time being and maybe we can expand it to website status by spring?

About us: Kip & Dev with three dogs and a cat and, for the present, a turkey named BuckBuck. We grow beautiful vegetables which are sold through the Oklahoma Food Co-op (oklahomafood.coop), Native Roots Market (nativerootsmarket.com), the Blanchard Farmers’ Market, and the Chickasha Farmers’ Market. We started out with a small garden patch in 2004 and are now gardening about an acre plus the hoophouses.*

* More on these later.