Row Covers and Garden Tunnels for Plant Protection

Extend your gardening season and protect your plants from frost, wind and insect damage!  

Guest Author:  Mark Greene

Floating Row Covers protect plants against frost, excessive wind and insects. To choose the right row cover weight for your crops it's necessary to also consider light transmission. For example, a 1 oz./sq.yd. cover provides more protection than a lighter weight cover, but does not allow as much light through to the plants. Choose from three different weights, ranging from a 0.5 oz. to 1.25 oz. to provide your crops both protection and adequate light for healthy growth. For general use, we recommend a 0.5 oz. weight for moderate frost protection and 85% light transmission. Cover individual rows with 6' wide floating row covers or quickly cover larger gardens with 25' x 25" blankets. 


  
If you are looking to cover individual plants in containers or hanging baskets, Easy Fleece Jackets do the trick. These thick 1.25 oz. polypropylene jackets feature a built in drawstring for easy closure and securing around plants and containers. Jackets are available in three sizes: small 26.5" W x 31.5" H, medium 31.5" W x 39" H, and large 47" W x 70" H.






Gardeners love using Garden Tunnels to provide a simple way to extend the growing season while protecting plants from frost, wind chill, and garden pests. These allow you to plant up to two weeks earlier and in tests, this garden tunnel has been shown to keep growing vegetation up to 25°F warmer than outside temperatures. Here in Rochester NY, we have used them to grow lettuce into December, even after 12" of snow! Easy Fleece Tunnels combine wire hoops with row cover material are easy to install tunnels can even protect tall plants like tomatoes and peppers.

Tunnel talk today

If any of you folks out there are somehow connected to agriculture, then it is probably likely you have read or heard about high tunnels. They seem to be the rage these days, and given their value, it is unlikely they will disappear any time soon. Growers across the country are realizing that high tunnels are just what the doctor ordered for growing many vegetable crops, cut flowers and even small fruit.

High Tunnel Interior

High tunnels become a grower’s insurance policy against high winds and storms, insect infestations and countless plant diseases that can decimate field crops. Inside the high tunnel you will find a controlled environment, much like any greenhouse, except for the fact that the high tunnel is not heated. In addition to protecting plants form Mother Nature’s wrath, it also serves as a season extender, and this is probably where the greater value lies. Growers can harvest crops earlier in the spring and later in the fall, when produce prices tend to be much higher.

There are several types of high tunnels available in the marketplace. You will find high tunnel ads in most agricultural magazines, or look them up on the web. Most growers we know tend to be quite innovative, so designing and building your own high tunnel is a fairly simple task. The important element to remember is to be assured that your high tunnel is easily moved from one location to the next every couple of years in order to practice crop rotation. The Harris Seeds Company lists several models in our High Tunnel brochure... just ask for one – it’s free!

Home gardeners can practice this “season extender” technique with the use of garden tunnels. Hoops are made from heavy gauge wire and inserted in the ground every four to five feet. The height of the tunnel depends on the crop you are growing. For early tomatoes, the hoop tunnel would have to be 4 to 5 feet high. Tunnels for peppers would be much lower. One can walk inside a grower’s high tunnel to tend to his plants, but the garden rendition should allow the sides to be rolled up for easy access to the plants.

Live and learn... experimenting is the key to success. The more experience a professional grower or home gardener has with high or low tunnels will ultimately lead to greater growing success.

Grow Tunnels are coming!

Grow tunnels seem to be the rage today, and for good reason. They are wonderful products that allow vegetable, small fruit and cut flower growers to extend their selling season and their level of profitability. For the most part, early and later season crops will bring a better price at the market, due to timing and weather conditions. By example, pepper and tomato crops can extend well into the fall, when all other field picked crops have expired.

In the immediate future, we will be launching a series of grow tunnels for our customers’ consideration. They will be extremely well-made grow tunnels and will be offered at very competitive pricing.

For those growers that do not have experience with grow tunnels, we will provide customer support by suggesting varieties and techniques to help make them successful. It is our intension to provide all the necessary support, from beginning to end, to make these season extenders a profitable enterprise for our customers.