The only thing I've planted that the deer don't bother is potatoes. (sigh) Sorry to hear about your problems, especially with the green bean re-planting. I've had to do that myself more than one season. Those %^&* deer managed to take at least one bite out of every single winter squash this past season. I kept my winter squash covered most of the season, but as soon as I left them uncovered for a day or two, they started nibbling. For the first time ever, even the carrots were eaten as soon as they came up. I have had success when my apple trees were young with a product called Hinder. It's an ammonia based spray. But, the thought of spraying it on my veggies doesn't appeal to me much. Good luck on your plans. I'd be interested in hearing what you do and how it comes out.

George, Jerreth certainly is having a challenging week. It sounds like the power might make it back on before you get home. What wonderful friends y'all have.....loaning Jerreth the RV with its' generator. I'm glad Jerreth is going to be able to save the frozen food. And, putting the refrigerated food in the 5-gallon buckets was a brilliant idea. That's a long way to haul water. So, I guess the two of them are building some serious muscle tissue.....and they don't even have to drive to "the gym" to do it. I know that you are doing terrific work at the Bible Institute and you are fortunate to have a spouse who shares your faith and supports your efforts. It can't be fun to be the one who is "home alone" at this time of year with the risk of ice storms, and I admire her so much for being willing to do it. You said that this is one of the "prices" which you wish y'all didn't have to pay, and I understand that, but we don't really get to choose the price we pay or the challenges we face. I know that Jerreth will come through this challenging period just fine and I suspect she won't even "rub it in" too much that you were off in sunny Mexico doing the work of the Lord while she was here dealing with the mixed blessing of having frozen moisture fall. Look at it this way: The good news, George, is that while you are away in Mexico, all your trees got watered. The bad news is that they got iced too. I hope the rest of your trip is successful and productive and the conditions at "the home place" improve soon. Dawn

OkiePokie, Sorry. I never came back to this thread in 2011 and answered your question. My hoophouse is 12' x 24' and even with 50% shadecloth (Aluminet) on it and with all 4 vents and both doors open, it is too hot to use in summer. Without a fan running, it hit 140 degrees this summer, and with a fan it still was incredibly hot. I mostly use it in the cool season. Of course, inside a hoophouse during the day, it is going to be hot because of the greenhouse effect, so I have to run a fan...and that is with shadecloth on the hoophouse. In Feb.-April of this year, even on cloudy, overcast days and with shadecloth, open vents, open doors and a fan running, the greenhouse was over 100 degrees. It is too bad it doesn't hold that heat at night. The issue with hoophouses made with a single layer of greenhouse plastic is that they are just as cold at night in winter as the outdoor air unless you're running a heater in there. A hoophouse with two layers of plastic sealed together with an inflator that blows air in between the two layers of plastic might stay a little warmer, but mine only has a single layer, so I am just guessing at that. I think even with an air-inflated double layer of plastic, you'd have to run a heater on cold nights or even on cold days. Plastic alone just doesn't hold in the heat, and I never expected it to. Before we built the hoophouse, we already had a glassed-in, unheated sunporch that is toasty on winter days but cold at night. I mostly use the hoophouse to raise seedlings for transplant into the winter/spring garden. I start them inside on a light shelf, and move them out whenever the weather permits. The hoophouse is an intermediate step between them growing indoors in a very controlled, heated, environment and going outside into the elements. Before we built the hoophouse, I would have to carry the plants outside to harden them off in ever-increasing increments of time, and then carry them back into the house, garage, potting shed or sunporch to get them out of strong wind or to protect them on a cold night. This past spring, which was admittedly warm very early, I moved the plants out to the greenhouse in late January or early February and never had to carry them back inside, except for pepper plants, which stayed inside until March. On a few chilly nights, I draped Agribon over them inside the greenhouse to give them a little cold protection, but they did just fine in the unheated greenhouse at night even when the temperatures dipped down into the low 30s and upper 20s. The Agribon is what kept them from suffering freeze damage. I've used it in the garden for years on cold nights, and it is wonderful. A large hoop house that is not heated will not stay any warmer than low tunnels, and I know that because I've used low tunnels for years. Hoophouses don't have insulation, although you can purchase and add bubble wrap type insulation. Busy One has some on his greenhouse and you might be able to do a search here and see what his looks like inside when he has the insulation in for the winter. I know he posted photos to show me when my greenhouse was still in the dreaming/planning/building stage. I haven't tried using large containers of water, for example, as solar collectors to see if they'd help the hoophouse stay warmer. I might try that if it ever cools down enough this fall for me to grow some winter crops in the hoophouse. We were in the 100s last week, and are in the upper 90s still and the greenhouse is still in the 110-120 degree range every day. My hoophouse hasn't been exposed to a lot of strong wind yet, but withstood 62 mph winds during a severe thunderstorm with no issues whatsoever. It also has withstood straightline winds in the 50-55 mph range that brought down some trees in our neighborhood. Carol, I have some of my hoops up, but haven't put the covers over them yet. I do have a row cover floating over the snap peas, but I'm letting it float without hoops. I probably will put up row covers over some of the hoops next week if the grasshopper population doesn't start dropping off like it normally does at this time of year. So far the hoppers are only eating purple sprouting broccoli and sugar snap peas. They have put a few holes in the leaves of southern peas and bush snap beans, but not enough to hurt their productivity. Normally we are seeing fewer hoppers at this time of year, but in this oddest of years, we are instead seeing more and more as new ones keep hatching. My cool-season crops probably would be happier if I'd drag out the shade cloth and put it over them. They are hanging in there pretty well, considering the high heat, ultra-low humidity (we bottomed out at 12% a couple of days ago, but only went down to 18% today) and gusty winds. I'm surprised how well they are tolerating the heat, all things considered, and I would have put shade cloth over them from the beginning if I had realized that September's daytime temperatures were going to continue running 10-15 degrees above average. Late today some of the lettuce and kale looked a little wilty and I had to promise to water it in the morning so it wouldn't sulk. As soon as it cools down some more, I'll move the container plantings to the greenhouse, but at the rate we're going, that's not going to happen for a while yet. Elected4life, I see that you are new here. Maybe you need to go back to the "instructions" and note that no advertising is allowed in any of the forums. I do not mean that in an unkind way, but this is iVillage's forum and that's their rule. Dawn

Hazel, It has been a good week to be productive. I've been spending as much time as possible in the garden and have the aches and pains to prove it. My body always objects when I switch over from indoor winter laziness to outdoor hard labor. This week I'm paying the price for abandoning the garden last summer/fall to work on the kitchen remodel. All around the edges of the garden, persistent pain-in-the-neck plants crept into the garden despite the heavy mulch, so I've been digging out lots of bermuda and Johnson grass. It takes forever, but I'm determined to dig up all I can find and get it out of there before it can make headway and take back more garden space. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the front garden and ought to have it back under full control in another week. Then I'll tackle the back garden. I guess digging out weedy grasses is a good way to kill time when most of the cool-season plants and seeds already are planted and it is still too cold to plant the warm-season ones. I am going to buy heavy clear plastic to solarize the area east of the garden where I want to expand it to make up for the northern and western areas that are getting too shady. I'd rather solarize for the entire warm growing season than rototill and dig out roots and go through all that this Spring. It is awful clay there which is why we haven't expanded eastward before now, and I'm dreading all the work it will take to turn it into good soil, but we started out with bad soil in 1999 and have made a lot of progress with the soil since then, so now we'll just start over with that process in a new area. Nancy, The worms will come. We had precious few in our early years but just kept working on the soil, and before we knew it, we had earthworms everywhere. This year there's a huge number of them. I don't know if there's more than usual, or if they are just more active earlier than usual since it has been so warm overall. When I want to attract earthworms to a new garden plot, I just put down cardboard and pile mulch over it. Earthworms love to eat cardboard and turn it into worm castings, so worms always show up soon after cardboard. I don't even know how they find it and know it is there, but they do. I love hugelkultur as a concept. It improves soil like nothing else. Many hugelkultur piles are built high above the ground in order to allow for the fact that the wood will rot and the level of the bed will fall. That is one thing I can't do because if the hugelkultur material is above ground in a mound-like shape, the rodents and snakes move in. I guess that is one of the hazards of living so close to the wild land alongside the Red River---wildlife is too abundant. So, when I build hugelkultur beds, I dig out a trench and bury 100% of the hugelkultur material. It means I have to keep adding more compostable material on top of the beds as the wood rots, but I don't care. I just pile on the mulch really thick and deep and let it decompose in place. We have a great many timber rattlers here (and their venom is very, very bad) and they come out of the woods and head for the garden, so I have to be careful that I'm not creating anything that makes the garden more attractive to them than it already is. While we also have plenty of copperheads, diamondback rattlers and pygmy rattlers, it is the timber rattlers that are the worst garden problem, followed by the copperheads. Generally I only see diamondback rattlers along the creek banks and pygmy rattlers in the woods. Water moccasins aren't a problem around the house ever since we removed the lily pond after the water moccasins moved to it in drought when the ponds and creeks dried up. I miss my lily pond, but having water moccasins in it eating the frogs made it too much of a hazard to keep. Sometimes I think about how much easier gardening would be if we lived in more of a city area where the wildlife is not so abundant, but I do love living in the country and never intend to leave. I just have to be a lot more careful. All my friends here are amazed I've never been bitten by a venomous snake considering how much time I spend outdoors and how many snakes we have here. I am grateful it hasn't happened yet, and won't be shocked if my luck runs out one day. I know how many close calls I've had, and I, too, am amazed that a snake hasn't bitten me yet. There's been at least two occasions when I was so close to a venomous snake that I can't even explain why I didn't get bitten, but I'm thankful it didn't happen. I'd build tons of hugelkultur mounds everywhere if I didn't have to worry about snakes crawling into their nooks and crannies. As it is, I have snakes in the compost piles all the time, so my actual compost piles never get turned once in the warm season because I don't want to stir up the snakes. I don't even want to see the snakes, and I'm careful to only load/unload compost nowadays with a compost scoop or shovel. I used to wear leather gloves and use my hands to lift compost from the wheelbarrow and drop it onto garden beds, but picking up a snake (non-venomous, but still.....) one day broke me of that habit. Most people here in my area (and by most, I guess I mean everyone but us) piles up brush and downed trees and burn them. We don't. We just find a place on the edge of the woods far from the house and make huge brush piles as if we were going to burn them, and then we never burn. We just let them sit there and decompose. I've done the same thing to fill in eroded areas where rain runoff has cut ravines and gullies. I just fill them in with brush and let it decompose in place. Add more to that year after year and the materials decompose and fill in the eroded areas gradually and then plants grow in the enriched soil and you stop the runoff from carrying off topsoil. It is a long, slow process, but we have healed a lot of badly eroded areas that way. It is sort of like building a hugelkultur for Mother Nature. After enough of the woody material breaks down, you end up with nice rich soil that supports native plants. Long before you even get the growth of the new plants, the piles of brush themselves hold the soil in place and stop the soil erosion almost right away. I'd rather be outside working than inside any and every day of the week. For a very long time, Tim worked evenings so I didn't even have to stop working outside until dark since I was the only one home. I was happy if dinner was just a bowl of cereal or a cold sandwich. Eventually he moved to day shift and I had to adjust to having someone coming home at night and expecting an actual home-cooked meal each night. It was really, really hard for me to drag myself into the house before dark, but I learned ways to work around it---the slow cooker, for instance, or cooking only every other day and making enough dinner to last two days, even though Tim is not a huge fan of leftovers. He still works days now and is unlikely ever to work nights again, but his workday is much longer, it seems, since his last promotion, so I still can work outdoors until almost dark, at least at this time of the year and still make it inside and cook dinner before he arrives home well after dark. During the height of the canning season, I generally don't stop canning just to cook dinner though. Either he brings home dinner or we eat leftovers or something that is easy to microwave. Usually after a long day of canning I am too hot and too tired to eat anything anyway, and he knows that and respects that because he does understand the amount of work that goes on in the kitchen during a full day of canning. The one things that having venomous snakes will do for you is that it will train you to get out of the garden and get the garden gate closed and latched before the snakes come out in the evenings. Our snakes use the gravel driveway like a snake highway and I need to be out of the driveway before they come out. I don't want to walk up the driveway to the house in the dark for sure. Some of my scariest snake encounters have been right there in the driveway, especially near the garden gate. It sort of makes me laugh to think that the snakes use the entrance gate area if they can, but it is true. We have 1" chicken wire fencing attached to the lower 2' of the garden's woven wire fencing in order to keep out the baby bunnies, and the snakes sometimes get hung up in that chicken wire, so they prefer to enter/exit through the gate area. Kim, I saw a news story on Facebook about the Tulia fire. My niece, who lives near Abilene, linked the story so of course I had to click on the story and read it. What an awful fire that was! It has been a long time since we've had a fire that large here and I'm grateful for that. Even though we're greening up early here, we haven't greened up enough yet to significantly lower the fire risk. At least a couple of fire departments are out daily fighting fires, but we haven't had a fire ourselves since last Saturday when we had a string of fires along I-35 that briefly threatened at least one home....and made a lot of people really nervous for an hour or two. I've been enjoying the quiet week and getting a lot done, but don't expect the quiet spell will last. I'm glad your greenhouse held up in the wind. With a new greenhouse, you never know at first how it is going to do in wind until you actually have that strong wind occur, so it is good that it seems like it can tolerate your west Texas wind. I've never yet seen a greenhouse here go airborne, but with some of the small ones that aren't anchored to the ground, I imagine it probably could happen. Dawn