A place where birds can't go
You’ve probably been asking yourself, What does it take to get The Slow Cook really excited?
Oh, nothing more than a bit of row cloth, some plastic tubing and a little sunshine.
You see, in years past I’ve tried to start my fall and winter crops in seed trays only to have hateful birds swoop down and nibble my little plants to nubs. I don’t have a greenhouse or grow lights. So where was I to put my little broccoli and cabbage plants where they could get enough sunlight to grow to transplanting size?
Voila! My solution: a small tunnel just for seed trays. I simply drilled holes in the ground, used those to turn plastic tubing into hoops and covered it with a length of row cloth from the garden center. Sunlight, air and water pass easily through the cloth. But birds and other critters are deterred (we hope).
Happy in their new home
As you can see, the broccoli rabe had already gotten a little leggy in front of the picture window, waiting for me to build a home for it outside. If all goes well, it won’t be long before our eager seedlings are big enough to be transplanted into their permanent bed.
Already the passersby are stopping to wonder: What the heck is that thing?
We are always doing our best to give folks something to look at in our front-yard kitchen garden, about a mile from the White House here in the District of Columbia.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, one mile from the White House.
Great!
Now when it gets cold you can use those hoops to cover a garden bed, change to plastic, bury the plastic edges in the ground, put the rowcover on top of your plants and voila, mini-greenhouse.
(didn’t you try that already, though? What happened, was it wind?)
El, you are always two steps ahead of me. Last year I tried a plastic tunnel design advocated by Eliot Coleman where the plastic edges barely came to ground level (to let in air) and the plastic was held in place by a looping string. We got a big wind that blew it apart. The only thing that survived was the spinach. This winter I’ll probably return to our old method, which was to hold the plastic down with bricks. But I should add that our farmer friend Brett Grohsgal, who sells his winter-hardy seeds through Fedco and Southern Exposure Seed exchange, strongly advocates planting certain arugula, collards, kale and other greens without any tunnel at all. Of course besides his open fields of greens, he also has greenhouses to fall back on.