After nearly 10 years of talking about it, we’re finally taking the plunge. As discussed in previous episodes about increasing food production, now is the time to put a greenhouse on our homestead. In all honesty, I’ve been getting tired of the short growing seasons we have here in Wyoming. On today’s episode I share the in-depth research I’ve performed over the past couple months on different ways to extend your growing season. Whether it’s a cold frame, a greenhouse, a low tunnel, or a high tunnel, today’s discussion will help you determine what option is the best for you and your climate.
A BIG shout-out to our podcast sponsor this month— Lehman’s Hardware! https://bit.ly/PH-lehmans
They are your one-stop homesteading shop for EVERYTHING you need for an old-fashioned lifestyle. Use code JILLMAY for 10% all baking supplies!
>> Don't forget to head on over to Lehman's and use the code JILLMAY for 10% off on their entire stock of baking supplies.
>>To begin this homesteading journey, head to http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/grow to access my full library of resources to guide you down the path.
>> Head over to www.theprairiehomestead.com for from-scratch recipes, homestead inspiration, and old-fashioned tutorials.
>> Get your Old-Fashioned on Purpose Swag at www.homesteadswag.com
>> Follow Jill on YouTube: http://youtube.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Instagram: http://instagram.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
After nearly 10 years of talking about it, we’re finally taking the plunge. As discussed in previous episodes about increasing food production, now is the time to put a greenhouse on our homestead. In all honesty, I’ve been getting tired of the short growing seasons we have here in Wyoming. On today’s episode I share the in-depth research I’ve performed over the past couple months on different ways to extend your growing season. Whether it’s a cold frame, a greenhouse, a low tunnel, or a high tunnel, today’s discussion will help you determine what option is the best for you and your climate.
A BIG shout-out to our podcast sponsor this month— Lehman’s Hardware! https://bit.ly/PH-lehmans
They are your one-stop homesteading shop for EVERYTHING you need for an old-fashioned lifestyle. Use code JILLMAY for 10% all baking supplies!
>> Don't forget to head on over to Lehman's and use the code JILLMAY for 10% off on their entire stock of baking supplies.
>>To begin this homesteading journey, head to http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/grow to access my full library of resources to guide you down the path.
>> Head over to www.theprairiehomestead.com for from-scratch recipes, homestead inspiration, and old-fashioned tutorials.
>> Get your Old-Fashioned on Purpose Swag at www.homesteadswag.com
>> Follow Jill on YouTube: http://youtube.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Instagram: http://instagram.com/theprairiehomestead
>> Follow Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
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welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. Oh, my word. I am deep, deep down the rabbit hole of all things season extension lately. So we finally agreed, As you may know, that this was our year to build a greenhouse and you can listen to Episode 103 for more details on our crazy plans. But when we finally said, Okay, we're doing this this is the year after, like a decade of talking about it but not doing it. I started to research greenhouses and season extension in all these options, and it was so stinking confusing. You guys, like my head was spinning. And there were heated greenhouses, unheated greenhouses, plastic covering glass coverings, panels, hoops, cold frames and sometimes all the terms were used interchangeably. And I'm going, What the heck do I even need to do to get this structure going? So I tend just the way my brain works. I need to organize and compartmentalized things in order to digest them, and I've noticed that sometimes when I do this, it helps a lot of you as well just to help sort things out and kind of figure out where you're headed. So in today's episode, we're talking about all things season extension, from cold frames to greenhouses, and I'll come to tell you how I am breaking it down and keeping it straight. I'm your host, Jill Winger. And this is the podcast for the Trail Blazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers and the backyard farmers. If you're ready to boost your food security and your self sufficiency, well, you have found your tribe. This episode is brought to you by Lehman's hardware, my number one all time favorite resource for homesteading and old fashioned living supplies. More than ever, I want to be supporting small businesses right now, and Lehmans is a shining example of that. Not only do they carry everything from gardening supplies to kitchen equipment and all sorts of very awesome off grid appliances. They've been a family owned and operated company since 1955. And let me tell you, when I visited their original store in Kidron, Ohio, last summer, I pretty much completely fell in love with them for a limited time. Only if you use the coupon code, JillMay, you can save 10% on their entire stock of baking supplies, which, yes, that includes their heritage stoneware bowls. You know, the ones with a blue stripe that you've seen on my YouTube videos? Yep, those are included too. So head on over to the show notes to grab the link and the discount code and happy shopping. This whole greenhouse thing. It's been quite the roller coaster for Christian and I also an epic display of our indecisiveness or, I don't know, confusion. I don't know what it is, but it's been a little bit crazy. It's probably good we didn't start, I don't know. Maybe we should have filmed it from the beginning. As it would probably make an epic viral YouTube episode cause it's so ridiculous. But in the nutshell, let's just say at first we were gonna build like a 10 by 10 greenhouse, and we're gonna put it by our garden. And if you watch the you tube video I posted a couple weeks ago, I kind of showed you where I was gonna put it. Well, that's all scratched. We're not doing that anymore. It's now like a 20 by 40 greenhouse or bigger, and it's going to be back on the other side of our garden, and then we had that nailed down, and then we went out there to measure it out. And we're like, Well, maybe we should do a hoop house instead. Can we do a hoop house? I don't know. Let's figure it out. So he went down that rabbit hole, and now we're back to the greenhouse and I'll kind of walk you through how on earth those things happens and why we came back around. But anyway, before we do that, before I talk about that, I wanted to just sort through some of the different types of season extension, because if you're new to this and maybe or not, But for me personally, I have told myself for years that I was locked into a very specific growing season in Wyoming. And I told myself that, OK, yeah, there's other people doing other things, but it's because they live in balmy climates and they don't live where I live. If I actually realized that was not a true story, I was telling myself a story, and it was not reality. So when I started to dig into this idea of season extension, I really quickly realized that I actually do have options, and that's a great object lesson for life. Like how many times we box ourselves into something and tell ourselves this is the only way. It is period end and it's actually not reality. There's actually a lot of other things we could do. So anyway, there's a lot I could do in Wyoming, even though we live in an epically poor gardening environment, and I just had to sort through the different options. So there's four options, and I just want to take you through them today, in case you have been feeling as confused as I waas about what the terms are and what the options are and what they mean. Okay, so the first thing you can dio to give yourself a little bit of a boost on either end of your growing season is to build a cold frame. Now, cold frames aren't uncommon. You probably have heard of them before, but they're kind of a favorite because they're very simple. They're usually quite inexpensive, and there's a 1,000,000 variations on them. In essence, a cold frame is basically a box that is close to the ground with some sort of clear top on it. And the goal is that or the idea is that it solar powered right the sun shines in, it heats up the area and the soil, and it produces this micro climate in the cold frame. Now you can grow full on vegetables in a cold frame in the winter or early spring, or you can use them to start seedlings. There's lots of different ways you can make them work for you. If you Google cold frame or you look up in a gardening book, you will see a 1,000,001 different ways to build one. You can use a basic wood box. You can make a area out of straw bales or hay bales. You can use an existing garden box. You could use plastic or an old window. It's a great repurpose seeing option, or you can use a clear plastic panel so there's lots of ways you can capture that son and use it to heat your cold friend Now for us, this is one of the first things we did just a couple weeks ago because I was waiting on timing for other projects to be right. So we walked around our house, figured out where we could build a cold frame, which is still in the works. But we also just took a couple of our raised beds, which were out in our front yard, and I put a piece of plastic paneling over the top, and I planted some cabbage and some seeds in there. The cabbage were seedlings and then I planted some greens seeds. Let me clarify, and they've been doing great, even though we've had some snow, we've had some really cold temperatures, and it's been raining nonstop. Everything is doing great. Other than one of my dogs got into it about four days in on one of the beds and dug it down to nothing like I'm talking. He dug the dirt was everywhere, and I wanted to murder him, so I had to replant that one. But that wasn't the fault of the cold frame plastic. It was obviously outside forces, but a cold frame is simple and basic, and a great way to play with season extension if you're not quite ready to invest in something a little bit crazier. Now, if you are ready to invest in something a little bit crazier. That's where something like a hoop house or a high tunnel would come into play. Now I'm a little bit embarrassed. Tell you how long it took me to figure out which was which. Because sometimes the different greenhouse books or the gardening books will use the word cold frame and hoop house and high tunnel and greenhouse and I mixed them all up. And they'll call a greenhouse a cold frame and they'll call a hoop house, greenhouse and a high tunnel, a hoop house. And not that any of those are incorrect, but it's extremely confusing. So for the sake of my sanity, I am calling a hoop house, some sort of structure made out of hoops. That is obvious, right? So Hoop House is also can be known as a high tunnel which makes sense. It's a tunnel that is high. You could walk in it, walk through it, and the hoops could be made out of PVC pipe or some sort of metal, and usually because they are this half circle shape, we can't cover that with rigid panels, so we cover it with plastic, and there's all different types of plastic some tougher than others. Sometimes the ends of a hoop house will be solid, like framed in. Sometimes they'll just be rolled, the plastic rolled up like a curtain, and you enter and exit that way. Sometimes a hoop house or a high tunnel is just enormous, like up commercial gardener could use it to grow for the farmer's market or the stores. And other times they're just little tiny kind of personal hoop houses now. Ah, hoop house is not heated other than by the energy of the sun. So you're not gonna have a heating unit or a cooling unit in there. Sometimes the sides can roll up. So if you have stuff growing there in the summer, you roll up the sides to make sure nothing scorches and you get the airflow in there. And as I was reading, I realized that one of the main benefits of a high tunnel or hoop house would be that you could potentially not always, but it can be movable, or you can remove the plastic to expose the soil. Now, why would you want to do that? That's a great question. I asked that myself and what can happen sometimes If you're growing in the soil in your hoop house and you're growing in the same soil year after year after year, you can cause some imbalances in the soil. You can get a buildup of salt, a build up, a pests or disease. And sometimes the best thing is to either switch locations or to let it be exposed to the elements for a season and allow some of that cleansing, that natural cleansing to take place. So that is a benefit of some more of a portable hoop house. Now we have the high tunnel, right? We just talked about that. We also have the low tunnel. Now a low tunnel, you cannot walk through low tunnel. That was my first realization. It is just basically a row cover with hoops. So let's say you have a strip of cabbage and you want to help your cabbage grow a little bit longer into the fall. And or maybe you want to help keep out bugs pests so you can cover your your cabbage. Um, on those cool evenings, I guess this wouldn't really apply to the pests. Scratch that, Pretend like I didn't say that. Um, but you would put some short little hoops over your row, and you would put your plastic over, and then you need to kind of secure that plastic on the sides by digging it kind of under the dirt. And then when you go out in the winter, you would need to move the dirt and pull the plastic up in. Harvest your crops so that could be a great option if you live in a mild place. I think as I looked at low tunnels, they were pretty low on my list of options or preferences just because, well, two reasons. This the wind like I don't if you've never been to Wyoming in the winter, at least the prairie part of Wyoming. I don't know if I can fully describe the wind. It's probably like nothing you've ever experienced in your whole life. We easily get 70 to 80 mile an hour winds in the winter. I mean, these winds will blow over a semi truck, not once or twice a year, like once or twice a week on the interstate near our house. They are formidable. Sometimes we've had several instances in the last couple of years where they were actually clocked at low grade hurricane speeds. Um, they're legit. So just some flocking plastic out there, secured with a few rocks and some dirt. It will be in Nebraska if I tried to do that. And the other issue is is I'm thinking, you know, we have drifting snow. So even if I was able to secure that plastic on those low tunnels down like crazy drifts form all over the place, and they could be really deep and really crusty and so trying to dig out the plastic under the snow and then put the dirt bag, it just sounds like a lot of work. So low tunnels are not an option for me, but they could be an option for you, and they're pretty inexpensive. So that leaves us with our final season extension option. So the greenhouse right now greenhouse that term can apply to a lot of structures, and sometimes you'll see people call a hoop house, a greenhouse or a high tunnel, a greenhouse for me. For the sake of my confusion, I like to just call a greenhouse something that's like permanent, and that doesn't mean is that the correct term? This is what I'm how I'm categorizing it. So to me, a greenhouse is the structure that is set in the ground in some way, shape or form. And it's not movable, and it's made out of wood that's gonna be there for a long time, and maybe it has plastic or glass or plastic panels for the actual glazing, but it's a permanent structure. Now when you get into the world of greenhouses. Some of them are solar powered only right, and others have very complex heating systems and cooling systems. And are little more gadgetized for us. We pretty quickly decided that we didn't wanna have a lot of money invested into extra heating or extra cooling, and just seemed a little bit excessive for what we're doing. So we just wanted a simple structure that would be heated by the sun, and that's it now a greenhouse. This is another thing that confused me a little bit. I was like, Well, do you start seedlings in the greenhouse, or do you plant stuff in the ground in the greenhouse and you can do both? You could do either or ah, lot of folks if you have those little tiny backyard Greenhouse's most the time. They're just used for seedlings. You want to start your seeds out there instead of in your basement like I've been doing for three years. You would do that out in the greenhouse. You might have to watch on the really cool nights or the really hot days, but it just keeps him out of your house and out of your way. You can also plant in the ground in a greenhouse. Now, most of the time, Ah, Hoop house or a high tunnel is going to be the thing that would say most of the time. Often those were the structures where people are having big, long rows for their market gardening in those tunnels or those hoops. But you could do the same in a greenhouse. Right? Okay, so hopefully that was this clear is mud, right? You have your cold frames, you have your hoop houses, slash high tunnels, you have your low tunnels. And then he had the greenhouse. So what the heck are we doing? That's a great question. So here is what we have decided for this moment in time it could change. Do not hold me to this Here's what we're doing. So we are putting our greenhouse to the west direction west of our garden. So if you can visualize, if you've seen a picture of my garden, there is. The garden was long rectangle with the beds, there is fuel tanks on one side. With this little teeny one break, we're gonna leave those there even though we had planned to move them. Scratch that, and we're gonna put the the greenhouse to the west of that garden on this open area. That's really unused space. Now the problem with this area it's a nice big footprint, but it's also very exposed to wind. So we're going to have to build a windbreak on at least the north side, northwest side to prevent it from being absolutely destroyed by wind. Now, there was a moment last week. Well, we contemplated Hoop House, Hope House, and we actually did a whole bunch of Googling and a whole bunch of price comparisons on a hoop house. As I was thinking, Maybe that's cheaper and it comes in a kit, and we could just get it and put it up. And it's not all this like structural engineering that we were gonna have to do, and we were close. We were closer like there's a good chance it won't be tough enough. But what if it was? What if it was so I emailed a guy. I found his name all over and he's an expert in greenhouses in Wyoming, which was so pleasantly surprised to discover there is such a thing. And he promptly emailed me back and said, You know, I don't think you should put a hoop house in your location. That would be a bad idea, which my gut knew that. But I just needed someone smarter than me to tell me that. So he said, with our hail, I didn't mention the hail. The hail here is ridiculous, like ridiculous. We live in one of the most hail prone areas in the nation. Our insurance is high here because of the hail. I feel like I am not to be a good job of selling you on Wyoming, but you should move here and be my neighbor anyway. OK, um, so between the hail and the 70 mile an hour winds in the wintertime, it's OK in the summer, but the wind is nasty in the winter he's like, do not put a hoop house up. And I'm like, thank you, my dear friend, because you saved me a lot of money and crying when my hoops in my plastic or in Nebraska. So we decided in a very long winded way. Sorry, that was roundly to go with the greenhouse. So we're gonna actually build a structured greenhouse. It will be a little more costly because we have to get real wood and we're gonna, I think, use those kind of corrugated looking plastic panels. There's a couple different brands. We don't know what brand we're going with yet. I know it has to be tough enough to withstand the hail and not get peeled off by the wind, so I'll let you know how that works out. But it's gonna be a fairly large structure. And my goal is that I wanna have benches for my seedlings around the edges and then a several rows in the middle to actually plant in the ground. Now, this won't be a moveable structure, so I'm gonna have to be very, very careful with my plant rotation and how I ammend the soil to make sure I don't get my soil balances off. But I'm willing to learn that and figure that out because, honestly, if if we don't build an actual structure structured greenhouse in the ground, we won't be able to do this like we just cannot do a tunnel or a hoop house in our area. It is not feasible. So it's kind of our only option if we want to grow more food for a longer period of time and that is my goal. I want to be less dependent on the industrialized food supply. I want to. We do pretty good, right? But we're still buying a lot of vegetables. Other places, because we're so livid on on what we can grow here. I'm over it. I want to get more sustainable with our vegetables and also have enough to sell or share with friends and just kind of feed our local people. And a greenhouse is gonna be a real greenhouse with not plastic. It's gonna have to have actual I mean by plastic. I mean rolls right. It's gonna have to have rigid plastic is going to be our best yet, So I will keep you posted our first step is trying to find the materials. We're having a hard time doing that locally just because a lot of our stores were sold out with all the weird supply chain stuff going on. So once we get our materials, we're gonna start mapping out the trusses and figure out the angles and all the stuff. And don't worry, you'll get to come along for the ride. I'll be posting lots of YouTube videos on this, but in the meantime, if you garden in a ridiculously harsh climate and you have any tips for me, especially in regards to greenhouse construction police in the my way, I would be very, very grateful because if you live in a place like I do, you know it is not for the faint of heart, and I'm open to all the help I can get. So we'll definitely keep you posted on how this goes. It should be good watching if nothing else. All right, my friend, if you are ready to do this homesteading thing, but you're feeling a little bit unsure of where or how to start, well, that is my specialty. I just so happen to have an entire library of resource is I put together for homesteaders, and you can get complimentary access to the whole thing over at the prairie homestead dot com slash grow, and that's it for today. Don't forget to hit. Subscribe So all the new episodes show up in your podcast player. And thanks for listening. It's so much fun and I'll catch up with you next time on the next episode of the old fashioned on purpose podcast.