Growing Conditions and Crop Performance in High Tunnels (2015) - 11 pages
2015 Cropping Season
The cover was left on the Gothic tunnel over the winter of 2014/2015, as this would eliminate the labor cost associated with removing and then re-installing the cover (Fig. 2). Keeping the production area snow-free all winter should also accelerate drying and warming of the production area in the spring – potentially allowing an earlier start to the growing season.
Over 25cm of wet snow fell during a storm event in late April of 2015. The Gothic design very efficiently shed this snow (see Fig. 2) – and no damage occurred to the structure.
In the first week of May the cover was re-installed on the larger Supersolo tunnel. This process went fairly smoothly and took a total of 10 person-hours. Unfortunately, as the field adjacent to the tunnels was still quite wet, the cover picked up a lot of soil being moved into place prior to installation. Efforts to spray the soil off the cover met with only limited success (Fig. 3) and light levels in the tunnel were reduced by this soil.
