Building a Low Tunnel

First of, I can’t claim any credit for this idea, but it was too cheap and simple and quick to build, I just had to steal it. It comes from a youtube channel by a vegetable grower in Saskatoon, and the whole channel has some great insights and tips.

I mentioned before we built the form to bend 1/2 conduit into hoops. It was a couple days before we got back to this, but on Monday, after chores were done, the kids came out to the shop to help bend hoops.

Which means they got to sit on the form and read books while I bent the hoops.

We made 6 total, and that was all we had time for that day.

The next day we fastened cheap key-ring carabiners to the hoops using hose clamps.

Then we planted our tomatoes.

Then we went out and shoved the hoops into the ground and covered them with 6 mil greenhouse plastic. Then Ellie got hold of my phone and turned the picture black and white.

Now to see if it survives the gale of hale that’s supposed to come through tonight.

You might be wondering why we put the tomatoes out so early. I admit, it’s a bit of a risk, but not as much as you might think. The nights can still get cool, but we are past our last frost date by over a week now, and the days are in the 50’s. It can easily reach over 70 degrees in the low tunnel during the day (we saw that with our greenhouse experiment in 2020) and the tomatoes are planted into a bed of decaying muck, which is not only great insulation, it actually releases a small amount of heat as it decays. If we can remember to roll the sides down on night when it is going to frost, and roll them up on days when the temp is going to reach 70 (our greenhouse got over 100 more than once), they should do well enough.

I don’t expect them to put on a ton of vegetative growth until May, but they will be putting on root growth, and the deeper and more widespread their roots grow, the better their fruiting when they come around to it.

Last year we had issues with tomatoes fruiting but not ripening. I have two theories about that, one being that the temps were too cool during the first half of the summer and too hot in the second half. The second being insufficient potassium and phosphorous. We will supplement these two with a little organic fertilizer this year and see if we get better results.