The tomatoes may or may not be profitable depending on your heating cost . Cucumbers are likely to not be profitable . Around here 95 percent is tomatoes with only a few cukes

Toughboy- I am not planning on heating these structures. I am just trying to get started 2-4 weeks earlier. I do have a source of heat, if during that time it gets too cold.

I have read that it is possible to do this. The only real expense I have is the plastic and my time. I have been able to round up the supplies, for free, or I have left over supplies to build them.

Around here, very few people have tomatoes to sell before July 4th. Last year, I pushed it and was able to sell a few tomatoes on the 6th. This was the first day of our market. I got starting date of the market to move up to the 21st of June this year. I want to try to capture a larger part of the early market. I also want to start gaining customers earlier. I have a large base of loyal customers, but I want to grow my piece of the market.

I think you'd be best served by checking with your extension agent or actually contacting the horticulture department at your main land grant college to see who is doing high tunnel in KS. When you find out, call them and then take a road trip. Those folks will be your best line of information. I'm still working 40 hours a week in addition to marketing and haven't ventured into high or low tunnels yet. I know there are some folks here in KY doing it but can't give you any advice.

Janet

I'm a market farmer. I grow in hoop houses and as of last fall, a four season garden. I can offer a little bit of help.

We still have 2' of hard pack snow on the ground. The soil temp in my gh was 40° first thing this morning. The overnight low was 9°. I don't have anything planted in the spot I've stuck the thermometer so there isn't any row cover. I haven't put down the black plastic yet. At 3 pm the soil temp was 60°. There's a 2° gain over yesterday's temp. We have snow in tomorrow's forecast so there won't be much sun after early morning. I expect the soil to lose those 2°. Start keeping track of your soil temperature now and find out what soil temperature tomatoes and cucumbers need before being transplanted.

I started tomato, eggplant and pepper seeds today. They'll be transplanted in late April, about five weeks earlier than the plants that will be planted in the open field. If the soil warms sooner I'll transplant sooner. Depending on how the lettuces, spinach, beet greens and other greens are doing, I might pull them ahead of time and put down IRT to help warm the soil. I'll see what's what when the time comes. This will be the earliest I've been able to plant warm crops so I'm winging it this year.

I'll start the seeds for European cucumbers three weeks before I plan to transplant them.

If it gets too cold outside you can wrap your transplant in heavy weight floating row cover to help keep the warmth in. I'll wrap a layer of IRT over the row cover before that drop to help add warmth. The dark color of the IRT will help. I let the seedling house where my tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings are growing go down to 40° overnight. I prefer 45° but sometimes I miscalculate the heater in the seedling house.

Are you going to use your hoops during the winter? We've eaten fresh greens all winter. What a treat! It took very little time over the winter to tend to the greens.

We put up our first tunnel this past fall. I have been amazed at what it produced November - now. It's great over the cold months for lettuces, greens and radishes. I plan to put my early tomatoes out next week. I have consistently had soil temp all winter in the 60's and higher. Here is a website you might want to check out. www.Hightunnels.org.

I think your on the right track about getting earlier crops . If you don't heat the high tunnels in most years you will gain 2 weeks on outdoor crops some years more . There are many websites with budgets for high tunnel tomatoes including one from Kansas State . Personnally I don't like the flavor of most high tunnel tomatoes and they spoil the customers with their pefect appearence . Yes I have had customers turn down field tomatoes and even stop buyimg from me just over appearence . I am just talking minor imperfections . So I try to get the earliest field tomatoes I can even if planting to early means I lose some . Always have backup plants . Most years I gain 2 weeks on most competitors . Another thing that will get you earlier fruit is to use plants from larger containers . Even when we had 25 degrees on may 24 the plants still came back . Work with microclimates and using row covers and irrigation for dammage control does work . But you have to stay up some nights and be ready for surprises . High tunnels are great for cool weather crops and some but not all flowers . Growing something like lisianthus that does not do well outside can be a real moneymaker . I think heirloom tomatoes crack much less because you can control moisture and peppers will turn red earlier as summer crops . It certainly is nice to have the first summer crops even sqaush and beans but will it make you more money ? I am not sure about that . If you can use a wood stove and plant 6 to 8 weeks early you should get much more profit out of it if you get the wood for free . But that works better in larger high tunnels The problem with small high tunnels is there just isn't as much ground to store the heat and the temperature will drop quicker . I would have a heater even a small space heater ready for those high tunnels you have

I have been doing high tunnels for around 12 years. Tomatoes are tricky. I get them about a week earlier than the tomatoes that do not go in the hoop house. Tomatoes really need supplemental heat to do well.

I have had really good luck with getting melons (cantaloupe, galia, charentais), cucumbers, zucchini early from hoop houses. Strawberries have been another real winner for us. We put hoop houses over the berry beds in Feb or March and that gets them to flower 6 to 8 weeks early and we start getting everbearing strawberries in late April.

I have found it is better to put hoop houses over tomatoes in Sept. to extend the season into November/December.

Our hoop houses are 24' x 50' or 100' lengths.

You should check out http://www.hightunnels.org out of KSU. Loads of information and lots of invites to trials and tours around Kansas.

Think a bit about size of the tunnels. You'll likely find you've been too conservative. Vine crops will fill a 12x16 pretty quickly. If the project is working for one thing, you'll undoubtedly think of others you'd like to try!!!

Hey jrslick,
I'm in Kansas too (KC). I've been market gardening for 3 years now (CNG). I have been interested in high tunnel too because of season extension possibilities but looking more at lettuces and other cool crops that can be grown into November (possibly December) and starting earlier in late February, etc. The lady that advised about going to the K-State was right on. They have lots of information and have been very helpful for me. SARE recently gave a grant to one of our local farmers who was experimenting with getting a jump on the season with bitter melon. Let me know how things go for you because we are in the same state. I have a full-time job so only have so many hours to devote to my small farm but want to make it my main job some day. Good luck!
Tom

Tom,

The high tunnel was great this year. I had tons of rough weather, but it survived (with a few stitches!) I grew 35 tomatoes in it and sold 700 pounds of tomatoes off of them. I started picking on July 4th and went through August. I could of had them earlier if I suckered them. I was selling them for $3.00 a pound for 3 weeks then went down to $2.50.

I am going to do it again next year!

Jay

We picked our first cherry tomatoes from the gh on June 30 and larger in July. If it hadn't been for the unheated gh this year we wouldn't have had cherry toms until August and full-sized tomatoes until early September. I've made notes on changes for 2009 and am looking forward to it already. Fall/winter crops are going into the gh now.

Wow Jay! That's great! Did you buy plans or kits for the hoop houses/high tunnels or are you doing them from scratch. I am interested in making a hoop house. I've got plenty of room. You're not heating yours right?
thx,
Tom

the advantage to the unheated greenhouse is control over the weather, not just the cold but too muh rain, hail etc. is best if u have automated power ventlation. works well for me my next experiment will be to bottom heat the tomatoes in the root zone with a hot water tank and a circulating pump. with a row cover in the gh it coul give a seriouse jump 3 or 3 weeks enough to get top prices for a few weeks before others. peppers do very well they love the heat. has to be a big enough space to asorb plenty of heat and u need space i grow my tomatoes single stem on 8 inch spacing up a string rows from 28 to 36 inches apart.

Tom:

I did not use a kit, I used a plans and modified it to fit my needs and supply budget. I do not heat it. I did add some heat when the temp dropped down to 28 outside. It was a very strange spring. Even with the 28 outside, in never got below 40 inside.

Jay

Hi Again Jay,
Do you have any recommendations for plans? Did you make your own plans or did you purchase them or find them for free on the Internet or some other resource?
thx,
Tom

do a search & check out the growing techniques of
Will Allen urban farmer/Milwaukee
he recently received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for his organic proven gardening methods

I realize this is an older thread, but I've got some questions for people who grow fall tomatoes in unheated high tunnels. This is my first year doing this and the tomatoes that were ripening a few weeks ago in the HT were awesome. What I'm finding now is that tomato texture is kind of mush and flavor not very sweet. I'm assuming this is due to cold temps. I'm in Maryland, zone 6b. We've had 2 freezes so far this fall.

Those of you who do grow tomatoes in HTs, how far into fall do you push it? My farmers' market has ended so I'm just growing for my family at this point. I'm going to keep tomatoes (and cucumbers) around at least another few weeks. I've got lettuce and greens in the HT as well, will try to keep that through winter. I wish now that I had used black plastic or red mulch on the tomatoes to at least increase temps at the roots of the plants.

its not just the temperature but the shorter days that make tomatoes not viable this time of year unless you add heat and light.

What varieties are you growing? I have found that heirlooms don't preform as well in the late high tunnels.

I have pushed tomatoes into December before, but I did add heat over several nights to keep them alive. They were loaded and I hadn't harvested any off that planting, so I "bit the bullet" and heated them overnight.

Here is what I harvested off of them for our December market.

They were all hybrid FL 91. Good texture and better flavor than the store. Didn't sell very many that day, that is when I learned that extending the tomato season doesn't always pay. So I backed up my last planting date and try to run out near the end of the market season and replant crops that will produce in the winter.

Jay

Didn't sell many tomatoes in December? That's crazy, those look pretty good to me.

Had I known I'd have tomatoes this late in the year, I would have looked into greenhouse varieties. The plan was to have HT tomatoes September and October, but they got transplanted late and I just started getting ripe tomatoes a few weeks ago. I'd like to extend it a bit more, but not if they're going to taste like mush. It's plenty warm inside the HT most days, but cool at night, and like Randy pointed out, not much light. Don't have a way to heat it this year, so I guess I'll just give it another few weeks and see how it goes. JB

For kicks this year I put a late planting of what were advertized as storage tomatoes into the hoop house. They are supposed to be able to be picked green, stored in the cellar and ripen in a month or so, then keep for another month or better. I'll push the plants as far into the winter as they will go, but I'm not going to waste heat on them. I'm also going to start some Beaverlodge tomatoes, which are always weeks ahead for ripening in the spring, and do them in containers with bottom heat as early as I can come spring. Quality probably won't be the best for either, but I just want to see If I can actually pull off "fresh" tomatoes year round in Z6. Might be fun.
I'm finding my late fall hoophouse tomatoes to have poor texture, but the Black krims are still holding good flavor. I'm picking them when they first blush color and letting them ripen in our much warmer kitchen. When real cold gets here, I migh try ripening them next to the wood stove, just to see if more heat helps.

Grow Life, I'm curious to hear how your experiment turns out. I wish now that I had planted some sort of storage tomato like that.

I've had some very good tasting Cherokee Purple and Black Sea Mans out of my HT, but the last few were not so great. I've also started bringing them indoors at first blush to ripen, to see if they taste any better. The tomatoes ripening in the HT now taste like they've been refrigerated, which I guess they have been, with temps dipping into the 40s at night.

I agree, mdfarmer, tomatoes that get exposed to too many 30s and 40s when ripening end up tasting bad, or even rotting. I had a very poor tomato year because the spring was cold and all the ripening tomatoes were chilled during a 4 day period of cold weather in early September. Despite a warmup after that, the fruits never recovered. Next year, I'm going to plant some in HTs. I reserved all my HTs for peppers this year and had way too many peppers to sell.

This is my first year with fall tomatoes in a medium tunnel (5 feet tall). It is turning out badly. Last year's later crop did better than this year's for various reasons but the conditions in the tunnel are rather nasty and I am getting nothing that looks tasty. It has been unseasonably warm here.

I've got to take better notes so I can figure out what's going on, because the last few tomatoes I've picked from my high tunnel were awesome. It seems like if a HT tomato ripens when it's very cold outside (30s), the tomato tastes like mush, but when lows outside are upper 40s to 50s, the tomatoes in the HT are protected enough to maintain a good flavor. It also probably helps that daytime highs here have been 60s, which makes it hot enough inside the HT that I break a sweat.

Little Minnie, if it's unseasonably warm there, what conditions are negatively affecting your HT tomatoes? Are you using greenhouse varieties? (I'm not)

One issue I hadn't anticipated was worms. I've got army worms, horn worms and all manner of caterpillar chewing holes in my HT tomatoes. In the field I only notice horn worms, which I don't spray because parasitic wasps eventually get them under control, but it's bad enough in the HT that I sprayed spinosad yesterday. Should have done that sooner.

No just my normal varieties but the shorter ones of them. Last year I put them in at the same time. A fresh row to produce when the others wane. I did row cover but not film. They did quite well. This year the bed I chose had lots of sunflowers which I didn't chop down, along with lettuce plants going to seed. So the late tomatoes were too shaded. Then it got cool for a few nights so I did row cover on the tunnel and then film when it seemed like it would stay cold. We have had 70 degree days in excess lately and it is hot and humid in there. The tomatoes are all cracked and ripen oddly. The ground cherries volunteering there are pretty nice.

I am applying for the high tunnel grant for April but need a 4 year signed lease from my landlords. I have a feeling they won't want to do that but I haven't heard back. There are 3 sisters and 2 brothers who own the land. Regardless I did do some tinkering with the HT plan!