Raised Beds and Low Tunnels

Reading Time: 3 minutes
By Ben Hoffman, Maine My garden area has two problems. First, there is a nearly constant, strong, northwest breeze. Second, the soil, Thorndike stony loam—read loamy stone, there is some soil between the rocks—was at one time landscaped with gravel around a farmhand’s mobile home. To ensure workable soil, I use raised beds with a mix of about 50% soil and 50% manure. Raised beds solve the soil problem, and each year I add manure and rotate crops.
I use row cover over the beds to keep the beasties out— notably white flies and their little green offspring that chew on my broccoli. I stretch the row cover on hoops made of 1/2-inch conduit but wind can wreck row cover. Because the winds were so strong this spring, I tried a new trick—plastic on the west side to stop the wind. So how do you secure the plastic and row cover to the conduit? I can buy plastic clamps for about $0.55 each, plus shipping, but my friend Mike came up with a better idea. He made his hoops from junk trampoline frames and made clamps by cutting PEX pipe into short lengths and cutting a slit about one-third of the wall circumference.

into rugged clamps. Top to bottom, (1) a short length of PEX slit on a bench saw and cut to length with a chop saw and (2) about 1/3 of the material was removed so the clamp can be forced over the plastic or fabric. For longer life of both plastic and row cover, use a 3 x 3-inch piece of plastic under the clamp. Photos by Ben Hoffman
I had some 3/4-inch PEX so I experimented with making clips. First, I sawed two-foot lengths longitudinally on a bench saw, then cut short lengths with my chop saw, cut the short pieces lengthwise with a utility knife and chamfered the ends of the cut with the knife. Lengths varied from one to three inches, but two inches works best.
The problem with securing row cover with clips is that the fabric tears easily. But by cutting three inch squares of six-mil plastic scraps and slipping these over the cloth, the clamp can be pressed over the plastic without tearing the cloth. If winds are strong, you’ll need several clips to secure the plastic and row cover. This solution worked well until the wind shifted, coming from the southeast, strong enough to pop the plastic clamps off. By not fastening the plastic to the bottom of the hoops, when the wind shifts, the plastic billows out at the bottom and relieves pressure on the clips.

WORK SMART, NOT HARD
Actually, you better do both. But as you get older, the hard part becomes harder, so you have to think smarter. After 50-plus years of wandering around through the woods on uneven ground, with some arthritis problems in my feet, I have to find ways to reduce walking. So when I opened up a new field to plant grain, how did I measure its size? Scaling distances on satellite images is close but part of the field is too wet, and that doesn’t show on the image.
I could drag my old surveyor’s chain, or a 100-foot tape, or my hip chain (a box containing a spool of thread passing through a measuring device). All require walking, and the easiest—the hip chain—was not possible because I couldn’t find it (another age-related problem). So I measured the circumference of the rear wheels of my tractor (104 inches) and painted the backside of one tire lug with bright yellow paint. Then I drove across the field and counted the number of tire revolutions. Thirty revs times 104 inches equals 260 feet. Then I did the same thing in the other direction, computed the acreage (43,560 square feet per acre) and had an idea how much seed to buy.
Ben Hoffman lives in Maine and is a frequent contributor to Countryside.