Cloches and Low Tunnels
Lots of flowering annuals and veggie starts have been available for weeks now at nurseries and stores across the Island. If you grow flowers and veggies for yourself at home, from seed sown directly in the ground, you’ve got plants up and growing already, too—and some even harvested. But you’ve probably noticed how much more advanced the professionally grown, store-bought starts might be compared to some of your homegrown plants direct-seeded at about the same time.
If you want to level up in this area, you should consider growing as the pros do, under spring covers of some sort. Cloches and low tunnels are two humble covers well-suited to home use.
Cloches are small “hot caps,” transparent domes of plastic or, back in the day, glass that can be placed over individual plants in the ground. Low tunnels are elongated, semi-circular covers for crops grown in a row, made of plastic or spun fiber and suspended over the row by a series of hoops planted in the ground on either side of the crop.
Both function as mini-greenhouses, increasing air temperatures inside them and, just as importantly, raising the temperatures of soils on their floors—the latter being the critical factor in getting seeds to germinate. These two factors combined allow you to get planting much earlier in the growing season than you could otherwise.
A related strategy is to mimic the professional growers with their high tunnels by filling your low tunnels with containers of soil and seeds, producing your own starts rather than eventually buying them. As the season allows, you can plant out your beauties the way you would any store-bought starts.
Sources for both cloches and low tunnels abound online and at retailers, but it’s easy enough to create your own. The bottoms of clear soda bottles or salad-mix containers work well as cloches, especially if you heap up soil around their edges to prevent them blowing away. Low tunnels can be erected using easily bendable, small-diameter polypipe for the struts and four-mil plastic for the cover. If you cut the cover extra-large, you can secure the excess on the ground with small rocks, preventing heat loss and the risk of winds blowing it away.
For more permanent low tunnels, you can install short pieces of re-bar in the soil to accept the ends of the polypipe struts, giving the struts a strong connection to the ground. You can also crisscross the tunnel’s cover with simple nylon rope or bungee cord to keep it tight to the struts, to strengthen it against the wind or spring snows.
