By Jessica Ballard
GreenHouse17
It’s that time of year when we begin to enjoy our high tunnel tomatoes. And we are loving them!
We decided several years ago to grow our tomatoes exclusively in high tunnels. We just found the consistency was better. We could monitor irrigation and our disease pressure was almost non-existent. We have very few insect issues on our tunnel tomatoes but for the occasional hornworm that catches an unsuspecting harvester by surprise!
Along with all of the the great benefits of growing tomatoes in our high tunnels…we get earlier tomatoes! Have I said how much we love them!?
We have discovered additional flower varieties that can handle the heat of high tunnels in the summer: lisianthus, celosias, ornamental peppers and sunflowers. Using this space allows us to free up precious “real estate” in the field and maximize our productivity.
While a few of our tunnels are cranking out our summer production, we are able to cover crop the other tunnels with dry beans and cream peas. We love cover crops we can eat, too, especially Calypso beans and Zipper Creams!
Bonus: We harvested our beloved garlic today, and we had to share a pic. 🙂
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