Author: Marty S

At the end of July I was out of town for a week. Well worth it, but the garden is now a jungle. I think every August this happens. Eventually you can’t outrun the weeds. Even with the minimal tillage I try to do. Next year I am definitely using landscape fabric in the tunnels. I’ve been avoiding it because its more plastic. I do see there are biodegradeable options now, though.

The tunnel above is still producing but tapering out for the season, besides the million roma tomatoes on the sides. The beefsteaks never got a solid 2nd or 3rd generation, and stopped growing. Not sure if this is a nutrition issue, or from the heat. I suspect the latter as the blossoms are dead and the cherry tomatoes are just trucking along.

I also finally planted some Dahlia cut flower seeds I bought forever ago, and they look super cool.

The small wheat plot finally matured. I harvested it again, though I still have a bucket of seeds from last year I haven’t done anything with. I don’t have a good method for harvesting, because I don’t have any machinery to do most of the threshing then winnowing.

This time, I use a scythe to cut all the wheat down. It went quick, maybe 15 minutes at most. In theory you can sweep the scythe such that the wheat stalks fall with the seed heads oriented the same way. My attempt is below.

Then I ended up with a huge pile of unmanageable wheat. I should have just used a knife/scissors to go down the rows and snip the seed heads. An alternate plan was needed. I realized I have a weed eater and it has poly cut blades – meant for thicker brush. I bought a clean trashcan and shoved a bunch of wheat in it.

Then turned on the weed eater and used it like an immersion blender. Note, if you do this wear full eye goggles and a facemask of some kind. The dust is ridiculous and chunks of straw and seeds WILL hit you in the face. Eventually the contents of the can is diced up to tiny chunks of stalk and chaff and whatever else.

From there I could use a shop vac blower , a small circular fan, and some hardware cloth to sort the rest down to mostly seed. Resulting in this:

About 2.5 gallons of seed + some chaff. I’ll sort out the rest later. Right now I don’t have a method to grind it to flour.

And the tomatoes are starting to come in. They taste great so far. These big beefsteaks are new to me, and have taken a very long time to appear.

I keep taking pictures but posting anything here. With a new daughter in the picture, time trying to grow everything is at an all time low, plus the other kids who are winning lots and lots of coach pitch baseball games.

But some stuff is still growing. Its a weedy mess now that the drought broke. TTons of tomatoes are on the way. Though in the first tunnel I think some of the plants got messed up and weren’t labeled properly. As some of the determinates appear to be in the middle rows. Hard to tell with some of these plants. I’ll know when the tomatoes show up. Unfortunate because we may have messed up and prune some determinates, which you should never do.

A few pics here, showing early June then the last week where its more of a mess. I’ve yet to get direct seeded lettuce to come up properly. I think its combination of the heat at the wrong times for germination combined with impatience. A few have come up but I’ve planted many full rows and not gotten great results, so far. I’ve had to back off of transplanting because its so time consuming, but some summer carrots are at least coming along.

And lots more tomatoes are starting now for the 2nd half of the growing season. Filling the back yard with determinants for easy management.

Most caterpillar tunnel providers give you a long spool of nylon rope. Then you tie it off at one carabiner, then loop it over to the otherside , one bow forward, then back other so you are two bows ahead on the side you started on, and so on. Until you get all the way to the end then come back. So one single length of rope is used for the entire tunnel.

But after some wind troubles, and generally having issue adjusting the ropes, I put my plastic back on using individual lengths of rope using trucker’s hitch knots. The advantage is if one rope breaks, the whole length of the structure will not come loose. I also don’t have to worry about tightening the entire tunnel if one section is a bit loose and then trying to manage moving the slack all the way back to the end. And these slip knots are so much easier to deal with. I saw Jean Martin Fortier did this in his short video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DnFGOb6hGU&t=379s and here is a general video on how to tie these knots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK5gE-3wuGI

Below is a picture of my tunnel with the new setup. The 2:1 mechanical advantage lets you get a section a lot tighter, too. I used a bowline knot on the starting side which you can see. If you do this, you’ll need a bit more rope most likely. I was only one section short using the rope the tunnel came with. Its already weathered 50 MPH winds much better than before.

One tip for when you are pulling the rope over on the side where the hitch will be – pull the slack up to about 4-5 feet decently tight through the carabiner. Then tie the slipknot. That will leave you enough slack to pull through and tighten it down.

The wind last Saturday was not very helpful, and it managed to take off a good part of the plastic on one of the caterpillar tunnels. It was flapping pretty badly and I got a rope over it, but in the end I didn’t want to risk the plastic ripping, so with the help of two small boys we pushed it over the hoops onto the ground.

Not a huge deal since that tunnel doesn’t come online with plantings until late April. It is a bit annoying to have to re-rope the whole thing. I’m going to do a different way this time with individual rope sections instead of one long shoelace style. The shorter lengths are secured with trucker hitch knots and I think are going to be more manageable for adjusting sections instead of having to traverse the whole tunnel to tighten the plastic down. More on that later.