Hoop House Farming: Plant Surveying Tips

One of the most important jobs in the hoop house is to wander around and survey the plants and to notice the priorities and the emergencies as they arise and there's plenty. So, what I've have come to do is train my eye to see emergencies. There's emergencies of dryness, there's emergencies of heat, there's emergencies of cold, and then there's emergencies of crowding or lack of nutrients. So, I might look at a tray of; a table of plants like this and I might try to discern which thing cannot wait. For instance these beautiful red cabbages, can they wait? I know for a fact that they're well developed; there's not much more for them to do there and yet I don't see any yellowing around the tips. I don't see any dye back. I can hold these guys another week or two by merely fertilizing them; we'll show you that later. However, take a look at this pot here. This was a mixed planting of crests and radish and Cole Robby and several other things. It was someone's idea of an interesting mix. You can see they can't wait another day. So, that's an emergency that has to be dealt with. So, I leave that right here on the desktop as it were. Here's another example. These are valuable heirloom tomatoes of the variety pineapple; two, three hundred plants in there. That is a highly valuable pot of plants and again we see that that cannot wait. My job is to discern these emergencies and priorities without taking a lot of time. Just by surveying my eye across the landscape I want to be able to tune in and see; as if they were my children, what their water needs, their nutrient needs. In this case these little cilantros have been water logged, so they have an opposite problem and we might rescue them by giving them a new home in this soil rather than sit around in a water logged soil. So, that's the task of reviewing and surveying and responding to hoop house emergencies in the spring.