Covering Greenhouses

The family just finished covering the first greenhouse of the season. They didn’t text Julie and me before they started. There was a reason for this. I’m a disaster on a ladder. I make my family nervous when I’m more than 18 inches off the ground.

I’m embarrassed, but not likely to complain. The poly that covers our greenhouses is supposed to last 4 years. Sometimes it does. Sometimes I hit my driver right down the fairway.

Covering greenhouses is a miserable job. The first ones we covered, 40 years ago, were quite the production. My brothers and my nephews were dragooned into helping. They were good natured about the experience, but they correctly thought it was a lot to ask. Julie and I have covered hundreds of greenhouses by ourselves. That’s a half day job, and depended upon several uninterrupted hours of no wind. Which is about as likely in northwest Missouri as palm trees and white sand around a farm pond.

We once tried to cover a greenhouse while it was foggy. Covering greenhouses involves pulling at least 5000 square feet of plastic with ropes over a metal frame. The plastic immediately stuck to the wet metal, and I had blisters for weeks from trying to pull the ropes. Think Saran wrap. We finally gave up, only to have the wind come up when the fog lifted and destroy $500 of plastic.

The kids have been helping since they were barely able to walk. They claim that they’ve all flown through the air as wind got under the plastic and lifted it up. I don’t believe this. As they grew older, we would wait until school vacations to do the job. Our children were all good students. I’m convinced it was because that loved being in school, where there were no greenhouses to cover.

We’ve had plastic ruined by hail and destroyed by windstorms. The worst thing that can happen is an ice storm. When the ice melts, is slides off and cuts the plastic on nearby greenhouse like a knife cuts butter. Julie and I once spent most of the night setting hanging baskets on the ground in a greenhouse that lost its cover when a tornado passed nearby. Most of the baskets survived, but windstorms will never fail to cause a sinking feeling in the pit of every stomach in the Hurst household.

My son in law Ryan built a contraption to lift a worker and greenhouse plastic over the end of some of our greenhouses. You pick it up with the skid loader and lift the plastic and one of the workers up to the end of the greenhouse. One time, my brother in law Mark was helping us, and I managed to dump him off the skid loader. We were talking about greenhouse covering during a recent visit. Mark allowed as how he would not be available. Ever again.

There is no place better to be than a greenhouse on a late winter day, when the flowers are just beginning to bloom. It’s warm, it smells great, you can work without a coat, and you are surrounded by beauty. This life has its rewards, but they are earned.