Poly-tunnel building

We finally finished the poly-tunnel over the weekend (do you remember when I started this … in June!), during a brief and unexpected break in the weather.  If I’m being honest I don’t mind telling you that I was beginning to give-up any hope of getting a calm-enough-warm-enough day to actual get the cover on it and it wasn’t high on my agenda for Sunday following the long-day we had on Saturday at the Morningside Makers market … I’d rather have gone to Glasgow as I’d planned, but a break in the weather presented itself and happened to coincide with some self-nagging about getting on and getting things done!

Jolene agreed we should do it, so we did, and having laid the polythene out and managed to get it so far over the frame we got stuck.  Just short of a pair of hands, fortunately the chaps over at the railway were having a slow day and a couple of them gallantly came over and lent a hand at an opportune moment – seriously, we’d have been stuck without them!

The polythene is the probably the single most important element of the tunnel, not purely in terms of creating a warm wind-free environment inside, but also in terms of ensuring a rigid and secure structure resistant to the elements.  In this vein the tension of the tunnel is really really important as is correctly pleating the ends for much the same reason, you should be able to tell from the pictures below just how well we managed to tension it (even if I do say so myself).

We started out at around 10am and didn’t finish until just after 5pm, at that point I stapled some polythene off-cuts over the door and we called it a day – we didn’t even stop for lunch!  I managed to get the doors done on Tuesday in-between torrential downpours that made me glad we had managed to get the tunnel done on a rare sunny day.  The doors took another few hours as I had to ‘adapt’ the instructions following an earlier mistake in assembling the door-frames.  Of course, now that it’s got doors the kids think of it as their personal retreat and one of the dogs seem to believe it’s her own personal glorified kennel!?

Anyway, it’s done now and I’ve even put some seedlings and tomato plants in there, something that only really serves to highlight how large it is.  I’ve been finalising my plans for it’s interior layout and established that if I run two 2′ paths down the length of it then I can have around 20 plots at 3′ x 2′ plus 14 plots at 4′ x 3′ … unless my maths is seriously lacking!  That’s a great variety of crops!!