How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel

Fill your polytunnel with vegetables for a productive garden.

A polytunnel covers your garden, warming the soil and lengthening your growing season. Digging raised beds and employing an intensive growing style will give you more vegetables over a longer period of time than traditional gardening without a polytunnel. Start your spring garden early with cool-weather plants, and end the season with slow-growing fall vegetables you may not have enough time to grow otherwise.

Things You'll Need

• 4 wood stakes
• Twine
• Chalk dust
• Shovel
• Compost
• Polytunnel and equipment to erect
• Drip irrigation system
• Seeds and seedlings

Instructions

1. Hammer wood stakes into the ground at the corners of where the polytunnel will sit. Wrap twine around the stakes to make the outline of the polytunnel. Setting up a border makes it easy to prepare the beds before you set up the polytunnel.

2. Divide the space inside the border into garden plots with 2 feet between them and 2 feet between each row of plots. Each plot should be no more than 4 feet square, so that you can reach to the middle without stepping into it. Outline each plot with chalk dust.

3. Turn over the soil in each plot to a depth of at least 18 inches. Mix a 4- to 6-inch layer of compost into the soil. This builds raised, enriched garden beds for planting.

4. Install a drip irrigation system as directed by manufacturer's directions. Lay the hose so that each section of your garden receives even watering. Keep a large bucket of water in the tunnel, along with a container for hand watering. This way you have warm water available to give extra to those plants that need it.

5. Remove the stakes and twine. Erect the polytunnel over the raised garden beds as directed by the manufacturer's instructions. Spring is an ideal time to put your polytunnel up, so you can take advantage of the extra warmth it adds to soil and start your seedlings early.

6. Plant vegetable seeds or seedlings in the raised garden plots. One way to do this is to divide the plot into 12-inch square sections and plant each with one type of vegetable. For instance, you can grow one tomato plant, four heads of lettuce or 16 carrots in each square foot of your garden plot.

References

• Growing Raw: Growing a Vegetable Garden in a Polytunnel
• The Polytunnel Book: Fruit and Vegetables All Year Round by Joyce and Ben Russell
• The Telegraph: Polytunnel Superpower for Your Veg; Joyce Russell
• Tim's Square Foot Garden: Plant List