The hoop house looks so phenomenal, it’s just stunning. For the Hoop House from Year 1 to Year 2, the #1 thing that would lead to improvement was just writing down the dates for seeding and transplanting. Because the Hoop House is a separate entity from the outside world, none of my record keeping for growing in the open field or in permanent beds would do much. What I needed was real-world data on planting in the Hoop House.
In general, I expect to improve each year as a grower, mostly due to this simple record keeping and making minor adjustments. But even I am pretty shocked at the results. This is 99% perfect:
Amazing!
In September’s post on the hoop house I wrote:
“…I’m going largely off my plant dates from 2025 and adjusting them based on my last year’s experience. The biggest thing I learned, I think, is that a full-size lettuce will hold in the ground for quite awhile, but that there is a limit. It will decrease in health over time, and be more susceptible to things like aphids. So my goal this year, to correct for this issue I had last fall, is to make sure that the lettuce is always in a growing phase and not a “holding” phase.”
And here we are in November, still in a growing phase and not a holding phase. I harvested the first lettuce from the hoop house on October 30th. They are beauties!
This growth is biologically powered.
All these strategies I adjusted from my 2025 notes worked. It just felt like A LOT of things to change at once. My motivation was also a factor…I really need to learn (sooner than later) how to make sure we have greens available into the fall (and perhaps even winter) for both our farmers market customers and our CSA (and for myself).
But the thing that gave me more confidence than anything else has been my serious experience growing lettuce. Since I started back on the farm several years ago, I have now grown close to 100 000 lettuces. This is a specific crop I have watched over and over again, planted over and over again, harvested over and over again. I have also failed over and over again. Through sheer repetition I can now identify the key conditions lettuce needs to do exceptionally well. I can’t talk to the lettuces per se, but I do feel like I can deploy some sort of vibes-based energy-frequency matching so that me and my lettuces are in sync.
I did have a couple of lettuce beds in the field go down this year, and to extend the silly analogy, the vibes frequencies were off on those, and I knew it. But even these situations are useful. I predicted at the time “I don’t think this bed of lettuce is going to do very well because of X, Y or Z step that was skipped, or done halfway.” In both cases this season I was correct. I had lettuce shortages twice during the 2026 season. When you’re working 12+ hour days for months, shortcuts seem really appealing.
Shortcuts were not how I was going to run my fall hoop house plan, and so it was time to lock in and go all-out. Unlike lettuce during the season where I can plant more on the fly, there’s only one available chance to get the hoop house correct. Furthermore, any prep work I did not only had to work for lettuce, but it had to set up my next crop in April for success as well, so this hoop house prep is pulling double-duty.
Here’s the 3 key takeaways:
1) The Dates. I needed full-size transplants starting by the beginning of September…but that’s the easy part. The more difficult part is trusting that my math was correct. That math is light-based: how much sunlight is available? Plants cannot grow without photons for photosynthesis. These 45-day varieties become more like 60 day varieties….and that’s with a very important caveat: they’re in the hoop house, not the field. A field lettuce planted at the same time might not mature at all, or require 70+ days. The difference is a bank-shot: soil temperature. The hoop house has been absorbing heat energy all summer, and we now benefit from a significant “climate battery” effect. What this means for our Lettuce is that our soil is still at a temperature where it can be biologically active, unlike field soil, which is now much cooler and going biologically dormant.
2) The Nutrition Prep for both Lettuce, Next Season, & Disease Suppression. While I was flipping over the hoop house from summer to fall, and you can see this in the YouTube video, I was thinking ahead to build my beds not only for lettuce now, but making sure the entire hoop house was also primed and ready for the springtime. This meant I really loaded up on Alfalfa Green Advanced, and included sulfur, before adding a rather thick cap of mushroom compost. The thinking here is that the Lettuce will primarily use the compost, as it will take some time for the alfalfa to start breaking down and become plant available. There is no possible way for all of this alfalfa to be used up by the lettuce, so we are making sure there is extra food available when the hoop house becomes biologically active again in the springtime, which is a time of year I will not be able to re-prep my beds. The sulfur will take several months to become plant available, so the sulfur release curve is timed specifically for my tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
3) This is treated as an unheated tunnel. While we can turn the furnace on, it won’t really help us here. It is not economical to burn dinosaurs just so we can have lettuce while it is snowing, and besides, the lettuce doesn’t need it. Lettuce is a very cold-hardy crop. In the last month, my field lettuce sat fully exposed (as in I did not put a cover over it) for multiple nights where the temperature dipped to -5C for several hours. Lettuce is far, far, far easier to grow in spring and fall than it is in summer….it just likes cooler, slower conditions. The hoop house provides easy cover from temperatures down to -8C or -10C. Adding a row cover over each lettuce bed gets us down to -12C or -15C without turning the furnace on. That heat-charged climate battery soil provides enough of a micro climate under each row cover to give the lettuce a major major fall survival assist. It’s worth noting that healthy, biologically powered growing systems are going to have better resilience in general, including getting a boost to cold temperature adaptations.
Actually, I don’t know what the limit is here. We have no data on what the limit is. Last year our Lettuce was finished by November 20th or so, but not because of cold weather…our transplanting dates were too late and the lettuce didn’t size up. So this year I will most definitely have some sacrificial lettuces to see what happens, and be able to go to sleep without worrying if my lettuce is going to be dead in the morning. My ultimate goal is to not turn on the furnace, but my guess is that it needs to go below -15C before we’re in the danger zone.
4) Winter Spinach and Kale trials. Like Lettuce, I do still have Kale in the field, but it basically doesn’t grow, even under the row cover. It’s just too cold out there and too little light. But my trial plants in the hoop house are cranking it out! That’s that warm hoop house soil, it makes a major difference. So we’re going to get a lot more Kale going in the hoop house next year, it looks phenomenal. The only thing I can compare it to is picking that first fresh springtime Kale in June.
The real mind-blower here is this new Winter Spinach variety I’m trying. Viroflex Spinach is truly amazing. As I understand, it has a vigorous root system, and supposedly, it will survive the entire winter in the hoop house and start growing again in March. With promises like that I just had to try it myself and see. The Viroflex was the first item to get transplanted in the hoop house back on September 2nd. And look at these ENORMOUS, beautiful leaves!
Wow!
Spinach doesn’t usually do very well with the mushroom compost, being a cousin to beets, which also does not like the mushroom compost. But the Viroflex seems to love it. My only hypothesis is that the root system is going well past the compost layer, where my usual F-1 Space variety initially seems to like the compost and then runs out of steam. I harvested just 9 feet of the bed and got close to 6 pounds of Spinach…so we’ll have to wait and see if there is any regrowth, or if it is too late. My prediction? If indeed they have this big root system, losing all that leaf mass will result in a short flush of regrowth, but won’t reach bigger-than-my-hand size leaves.
Anyway, loving this variety, and it will surely find a home in some beds next season. Since it’s so cold hardy, it should do okay even out there in the field under a row cover, and after it freezes hard, we might just get a really really sweet candy-like spinach treat. So I’ll be trialling this one again next season in the field.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
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