Winter Tunnel Complete!

How we’re preparing it for it’s first crop.

The crew at Quality Structures who built our new winter tunnel wrapped up construction about a week ago. All that remains is a bit of dirt work around the outside perimeter of the tunnel. That means it’s time to get this tunnel ready for it’s first crop: paradoxical summer lettuce. I’ll explain why summer lettuce and what we are doing to prepare this tunnel for production.

When we designed the winter tunnel we knew we wanted a space that we could use for both winter and summer production. We’ve seen other deep winter greenhouse designs and they are basically unusable in the summer because they get too hot. We are pretty confident our winter lettuce will be successful and cost-effective but we’re not 100% sure about that. We thought that if we’re going to invest this much money then we need to be able to utilize it like our other tunnels. So, because this tunnel is also capable of producing summer crops and due to some space limitations in our other tunnels the first crop in this tunnel will be summer lettuce. In future seasons we will rotate this tunnel between summer peppers/cukes/tomatoes and winter crops.

To prepare the growing space we planted a cover crop mix of annual rye grass and clover. These cover crops will grow for about a month before we terminate them and prepare beds for summer lettuce. The annual rye grass and clover will help loosen the soil and add some nutrients back into the soil. Both will also suppress weeds and add organic matter to the soil.

We can’t wait to start growing in this new winter tunnel!

In the new winter tunnel!