Polytunnel Door Woes

Polytunnel Door Calamities; potting up tomato plants and a recipe for spicy carrot and chickpeas

Myself and Richard have nerdy horticultural conversations and slagging matches over coffee at GROW HQ. I slag him about boring the pants off me with this expansive lectures about nitrogen nodules on broad bean roots. He slags me off about having written books and built a career in horticulture despite having no horticultural training and very little knowledge. In spring he gets exercised about me sowing things too early, particularly tomatoes. I sow mine in late February and he waits until late March to sow his. He calls me a premature germinator.. it’s the kind of gardening innuendo he gets a kick out of.

I hate it when he’s right, but turns out he’s right - this year at least.

As I have written about here, I sowed my tomatoes in late February, starting them off 10 seeds to a 10cm pot, and then a few weeks later moving them on in to a single 80-module module tray. Problem is, thanks to the fine weather and sunshine in March and my new heating mat in the glasshouse, my plants have now outgrown the module tray they are in, and need to be moved on and planted out in the polytunnel. This would be ok in a normal year - they might shiver a little at night if it turned cold (see tip at the end of this column), but by and large tomatoes are hardier than we give them credit for. This is not, alas, a normal year. ..

To explain why, I have to take you back maybe 8 years to when I bought the big commercial tunnel that I have in the field beside the house. To feed my tomato fetish, I bought a tunnel that cost me about €3.5k and to save a few bob I decided to opt for timber swing doors, rather than sliding aluminium ones. I saved perhaps €300 at the time. What seemed like a canny decision, turned out to be something else entirely, when the swinging doors got absolutely mangled in a storm a few years later in 2021. Swinging doors, it turns out, can do an awful lot of swinging in gale force winds.

For a year or two I soldiered on without replacing them, fashioning a sort of roll up door using a large sheet of plastic bolted to the door frame with a heavy plank of timber at the base to weigh it down. Then, in another storm in 2023, the heavy plank of timber became airborne (more swinging), swinging and thrashing violently from left to right and up and down like a cocaine-addled bear while I looked on helplessly from the kitchen window. By the time it stopped swinging, it had put a couple of nice gashes in the plastic to each side of the door and on the roof. At that point, a sane human would have learned a lesson and bought the aluminium doors that I should have got at the beginning. I did indeed get a quote for them which at €600 including installation I judged too pricey. And so, piling stupidity on stupidity, I opted for a zip-up polyflap for €250 instead. This, I duly installed in spring of last year feeling very pleased with myself, but it lasted less than a year, and despite being fully zipped up, got pulled asunder by Storm Eowyn.

So I enter my eight year with this polytunnel with the door saga continuing and largely unresolved. So far this spring, I have mulled options that include (a) buying the sliding doors, (b), buying another polyflap and (c) asking Mrs Kelly to try and repair the old polyflap on her sewing machine (well it could work)..

While the mulling continued, the tomatoes kept on growing. So why not leave them in the module tray? Well, when tomato plants are in a module tray and getting bigger they are competing for light. 80 plants is ALOT when you consider they are in a footprint of just 50cm or so in the module tray. This can result in you losing the early fruit as the plant wisely decides it won’t have enough light for the first fruit truss. Also, the little modules just don’t have enough compost in them for the growing plants which means they start running out of food. So I had a decision to make to either plant them out in to the polytunnel that has no door on it (and risk a cold spell ruining the whole crop), or to pot them up and buy some time. It should be said that the problem is compounded by the sheer volume of plants - at nearly 80 individual tomato plants, it feels like this year’s BIG GIY DECISION. So, I opted to pot them up.

Potting them up in to their own pots is a good plan on the face of it - it buys me at least 3-4 weeks before I will need to plant them out, building vigour in the plants and giving me time to get my shit together on the tunnel door situation. But of course it is an expensive option in terms of cost (all that compost) and labour (all that time). And of course, if I don’t give them plenty of space between the pots in the glasshouse, the light access problem could be the same.

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Meanwhile, Richard with his puny little seedlings (planted a full month later than mine) is sitting pretty. And even if his seedlings did need planting out, he’s got those lovely aluminium sliding doors on the tunnels in HQ that glide open and close perfectly and noiselessly. In the weeks ahead I can expect more lectures about careful spring polytunnel temperature control, and I will just nod along and wonder what my next polytunnel-door play should be.

As a side bar, I am reminded of a tip I got some years ago from a wise old GIYer - Hugh O’Neill, father of my friend Feargal - about keeping tomato plants toasty in cold weather. Hugh’s tip was simplicity itself - get a sheet of newspaper and pull it down over the cane that’s supporting the tomato plant, making a hole in the centre of the sheet. The paper will then rest gently over the plant, keeping it nice and snug, and can be pulled off again the following morning.

Recipe of the Week: Spicy Carrot and Chickpea Pitta Pocket

As the hungry gap really starts to kick in, and the range of veg available from the garden narrows, I’m on the hunt for recipes that use a single veg and some store cupboard ingredients to good effect. This is a great example from River Cottage Veg Every Day, using some lovely GROW HQ organic carrots for a lovely light supper or lunch.

I used a sourdough bread instead of the pitta bread, spreading a little yoghurt instead of butter and heaping the carrot mix on top. You can also add a little crushed cumin seed to the yoghurt for an added kick. Delicious.

Ingredients:

50g butter

• 1 tablespoon rapeseed or olive oil

• 1 heaped teaspoon cumin seeds

• 4 large carrots (about 500g), peeled and cut into 2–3mm thick slices

• 1 large garlic clove, finely sliced

• Finely grated zest of 1 orange, plus a good squeeze of juice

• 1 teaspoon hot smoked paprika

• 400g tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed

• 4 pitta breads or freshly cooked, soft flatbreads

• 4 heaped tablespoons plain (full-fat) yoghurt or soured cream

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

Heat the butter and oil in a frying pan over a medium heat.

Add the cumin seeds and let them fry for a minute or two. Add the carrots and fry for about 8–10 minutes, stirring often, until tender and starting to brown, but still with some bite.

Add the garlic, orange zest, paprika and chickpeas and cook until the chickpeas are hot. Remove from the heat, season with salt and pepper and add a good squeeze of orange juice. Taste and add more salt, pepper and/or orange juice as needed.

Spoon some of the chickpea mixture into the pocket of a warmed pitta (or into the middle of each flatbread) and top with a spoonful of yoghurt or cream. Fold flatbreads, if using. Serve straight away.