Space is somewhat of an issue for us on our lot and this hoop house works perfectly since it can be dismantled during the summer months. For about $102.00 at Home Depot you can have one too! Our supplies (plus a little work and a tiny bit of thinking) bought us an 18′ long by 8′ wide hoop house with extra’s to build another small hoop house  over an existing raised bed. (or we will just keep it for repair.) Oh, and we haven’t put the doors on it yet…actually we haven’t even made them yet but the tomatoes that are currently inside would roast if we had them there so we will keep you posted on the doors (more on that after the mountain bike race, family birthdays, and out-of-town visitors.)

Our materials included…

- 2 X 4′s for a rectangular frame to fasten the  hoops to.
- 10′ sticks of 1/2″ PVC plus fittings (couplers, T-couplers and 4-way couplers)
- Gorilla Tape (This stuff is great!)
- 6 mil plastic
- staples
- 1/2″ pipe clamps
- 1-1/4″ wood screws
- 48″ wood lath / slat board (for securing the stapled plastic from wind / tearing).

We’re well on our way to a fruitful winter garden inside our hoop house and our cold frames. We haven’t even closed the ends and the tomato plants that were in the garden space we covered are loving the warmth and showing us this by ripening faster than our outdoor tomatoes.

Building the hoop house is pretty simple. If you have any specific questions or need ideas on integrating your own available materials into a hoop house let us know and we will see if we can help you out.  Here are some photos we took along the way and we’re sure you can figure most of  it out from there.

Back in the spring we came across a couple of nice vinyl windows for $5 each. One blew over during a wind storm and busted (so sad) but we used a few older windows to replace it and completed our cold frames for forcing seeds and essentially maintaining a mini greenhouse. Our cold frame is simply a wooden box with a hinged window top. We framed in the window with 2 x 4′s and connected it to the box with hinges. The frame that uses the older windows used three to make up the lid but it was easy to screw them together….just work with what you have.

Our next project is to build a hoop house over one of the garden beds in the back yard. We’ll share more on that soon, hopefully!

The weather is still mild here in Eugene but the summer crop is past its peak and on a steady decline. We started basil, radishes, Romaine and a second type of lettuce in the cold frames.  We also added some 4″ pots to one of them and planted cauliflower, and two varieties of brocolli. These will go into the future hoop house once they have rooted. It’s all an experiment…we are having fun just doing things and figuring it out along the way. Learning when to plant successive crops (and exactly what to plant and when) would be awesome but I don’t know if I will ever be that organized. I guess it will just have to fall into place because the balance found itself. In the meantime….we are eating enough food to make it worthwhile and it’s fun. What else would we be doing?? Watching TV?? blech!

Click Thumbnail to Open Lightbox Viewer

The last of the blackberry roots have been dug out although I’m sure we will have to attack a few spirited sprouts every now and again. The nasturtium seeds that the kids and all their neighbor friends sowed are now sprouting, in large, thick clumps. I considered splitting them while young and spreading them around a bit more but that is low on the priority list right now, at least until I get the rest of the veggie starts planted which is just some tomatoes, a couple hot peppers and some mystery plants. All of the leaves that we had delivered in the fall have become a good composting mulch and it all has a home in the yard now. This fall I will double our drop because I could surely use some more!

The cinderblocks that were around the original garden bed are now gone, mostly. A few remain because we don’t have any material to fill in the gap that will be left behind and cause erosion. I am so excited about this though because I always thought they were the biggest eyesore and they honestly did not serve a very good purpose in the form they were being used. It was difficult to get grassy weeds out and weeds and blackberries would even grow up inside of the little cutouts that are in cinderblocks.  Here is what the bed used to look  like (this was our only gardening space) and what we have now. Removing the cinderblocks and adding leaf mulch will increase our gardening space, soften the edges of garden making it more visually appealing and as I mentioned above, weeding will be so much more efficient with them gone. Notice the blackberries in the back of the yard in the photo on the left. That was just a few months worth of growth since they had been hacked back the previous fall so the area was a bit larger when we tackled it. It is difficult to see in the current photo what has been done in the area that was once a blackberry patch but I will get a better picture soon. For now I can tell you that we have a plum tree planted back there along with some summer veggies and perennials that I divided or being grown from seed.

The cinderblocks have been repurposed into a wall that disguises our compost/clutter area and I planted a marionberry in front of it which will likely outgrow it’s place there but it’s close to one of the raspberry patches so it seemed like a good spot. Marionberries aren’t super vigorous though so it won’t be too hard to keep cut back. Speaking of berries, I added another 8 plants for a total of 48 raspberry plants! We won’t see a very big crop this year since half of those were planted this year and we have yet to see if some of the plants make it but I am hopeful and so excited that the kids will be able to forage in the yard.

With inspiration from some friends we brought in some straw bales to give straw bale gardening a try. I let them sit out in the rain for a week and then I dug a small hole out of the straw and spread some compost on the top then planted some of my veggie starts. then I put the straw that I pulled out back around the plant. I fit 3 pepper plants into one bale and put 2 summer squash plants into one bale. The biggest reason we opted for straw bales this year is because the garden bed that we sheet mulched last fall just doesn’t seem ready; the ground is full of clay and the soil is very compact.  Often times a garden bed takes years to really be prime for gardening so we aren’t rushing it and I figure that having the composted straw bales with compost getting mulched into the bed will only help the soil composition. I am still planting some tomatoes directly into the bed because they seem to be doing well. We also have some mystery sprouts growing from the compost that was put into the bed. I think they are a summer squash that we grew last year, Ronde Nice, although I hope they are pumpkins otherwise our neighbors will be full of squash too!

Once I get these veggies in I don’t think I will be doing much more planting and I don’t have any major projects planned and I prefer to sip ice tea in the shade when it gets hot out. My goal is to keep the weeds from creeping back into the space that we have mulched and I will also be learning how to increase the soil composition of our garden area and we’ve got cold frames that need to be ready for the fall. Plus I would like to figure out a way to build the kids a cool fort on the cheap. Any ideas?? Oh, and we needed to get the clothesline put back up last week! Work, work, work!

My thoughts are constantly stirring with new ideas and garden plans of how the next section of yard might look. Yes, we are fortunate to have a flat city lot where we can do just about anything when compared to a sloping lot but sloping lots are gems of another category but we aren’t covering that right now. Having a few small areas and sights like these keep me motivated to continue building our own paradise.

While we were working on this garden bed project, a great friend and helper stopped by the house and took all three of our children to the park! How amazing is that?? Sammy and I worked head-to-head moving down the 4×20 foot bed as we relished over the awesome earthworms and black dirt that we were going to be gardening in. The turning of this bed went much faster than we had anticipated. Renting a rototiller would not have been money well spent plus we would have killed so many great worms. (Some people actually try to grow worms, you know…)

Amazingly enough the sun continued to shine on us and we moved on to the blackberry eradication project. I had bought Sammy some leather gloves with the hopes that the project might be a little less painful. They did prove to help because he was able to grip the vines but finally he realized the usefulness of a metal garden rake and started using it to his advantage. We still have some digging of roots to do and then we will be moving as much leaf compost into the area as possible. I am so excited because this is all happening much sooner than I expected.

At the advice of a good friend and fellow gardener, I reluctantly plucked the blossoms from my newly planted 1 gallon size blueberry plants. Doing this is suppose help the plant get larger during the growing season rather than working on producing a handful of berries. I tossed the blueberry blossoms at the chicks to eat because I thought they must be packed with all kinds of energy and nutrients….probably should have ate them myself. The raspberries that were planted last year have some blossoms on them also but I left those on since they are such vigorous growers but I did have some weeds to pull from their growing area.

In the vegetable garden I planted some more radish and lettuce seeds since it has been about 2 weeks since I planted the last set. We now have 4 different varieties of lettuce growing, so long as the buttercrunch and romaine sprout. Speaking of sprouting seeds, we have some sunflowers that are peeking up out of the ground. We even had a couple of frosts over the last 4 or 5 days so I was a bit surprised to see them. I meant to put a little bit of leaf cover over them today but forgot to. If these puppies make it we are going to have some great looking sunflowers!  Looking forward to sharing some photos as things keep moving along.

I have been lusting after the idea of turning the rich leaf compost (partially visible in the foreground of the photo) into the soil where we are developing a new garden bed that will almost double our current vegetable gardening space. But with all the rain the soil is too soggy…and I wait patiently, daydreaming of the rich soil and what the space might look like with a cold frame over it.

If a cold frame over one of our vegetable rows doesn’t materialize I won’t be disappointed because we do have some wood/glass pane cold frame boxes in the works. These boxes will probably go into an area where we are clearing out some blackberries (notice the blackberries in the upper right of the photo? They are covering the entire back corner of the yard) and plan to let the chickens roam and scratch up the soil to kill off the roots. Hopefully time will grace us and these blackberries will be a thing of the past come October.

For now we are growing:

Snap peas
Brocolli
Cauliflower
Swiss Chard
Radishes
2 varieties of Lettuce
Cilantro
bunching onions

I also broke the rules and planted some seeds outdoors that would not tolerate a frost (melons, sunflowers and morning glory’s). Maybe this is what brought on this cold rain storm…But I feel confident that we will have some survivors that will take the lead on growing and give us a welcome harvest of goodies and beauties.

The other seeds that we have started for our summer crop are growing in a sun room at a friends house. We don’t have good southern exposure from anywhere indoors so we hauled a rack and our seeds down the road to a place where they could thrive. I just love how seeds want to grow. Some are so tiny and dry and almost seem void of life yet they burst with life when given just a fraction of care. Growing food is so simple and rewarding, if you aren’t doing it right now what is stopping you? And if you are growing your own food think about the possibility of growing even more.

The raspberries that we planted are doing great. They have tons of new growth on them and some are even producing flowers for berries. An Indian Summer and some bees would do us good.

I realized how inefficiently I used some of the garden space we had so I do have better plans for next year. I’ve cleared out most of the summer vegetables to make room for a fall crop which includes: brocolli, brussel sprouts, chard, red cabbage, radish and a variety of lettuce.

Find out what worked well and what didn’t in our Eugene, Oregon garden.

Over the winter I was given a book by my good friend Sarah titled Food not Lawns by Heather Coburn Flores. I read through parts of the book and was inspired to add to the land that I called home whether I was still calling the same place home in 2, 3, or 5 years. I was taught as a child to always leave places we stayed better than we found them, this included campsites too. So the idea of it came easy to me, I could help my community by growing food in the dirt surrounding my house. Maybe I would trade produce with the lady across the street for her eggs or maybe I could give someone in need the healthiest food they would eat all week. And when I left this place, someone else would continue to enjoy the freshness that came from this landscape.

We did of course clear an area for a vegetable garden and sooner than later I determined that this just wasn’t enough space and we would turn our lawn into food sooner than we planned. I envisioned all of the things we could plant that would harvest food; raspberries, blueberries, watermelons, the assortment of vegetables that we are all familiar with and more. And then I rethought it and moved boxes around in my mind, re-organized garden beds and even thought of interesting things to plant.

I know some people find it difficult to see the end result of gardens and landscapes and if you are one of those people I want to help you see where the beginning starts and that there is no wrong way to do it. If you are an accomplished gardener then you can follow along, add some of your ideas to the comments and maybe even find some inspiration of your own.

This is the beginning of our lawn to food journey and here is where we started.

-August 2009 -

We were given some raspberry starts during the heat of the summer. They came to us bare root in a bucket full of water. There was not any time to delay the planting of these gems as roots sitting in water will rot so we dug up a small area and put them in the dirt. Although they are wilting a bit from the heat we have them mulched with leaves and we water them well.

Our city has a lot of deciduous trees so we can get leaf drop offs and leaves along with compostable paper bags are what we will be using to kill of some of the grass. It’s the least labor intensive way to do it and the leaves will add great compost to the soil. In the photos above you can see how the leaves are covering a larger area than just where the raspberries are at. This is because we will be creating another bed to plant strawberries and other edibles not yet determined. The 5×4 garden box behind the fence will house two blueberry plants and we will be adding 3 more boxes to the same area. Since we will be saving a lot of money by starting our own seeds and collecting offshoots from neighbors plants we will probably spring for larger 5 gallon size blueberry plants so we can get a small crop sooner.

When we add boxes or garden beds to our lawn we leave enough room to move around comfortably and get the lawn mower through. The last boxes we made were nice and hefty complete with gopher wire. Two boxes cost us approximately $100 in materials and 90% of it was reclaimed wood. This time we plan to make “recession boxes.” When Sammy completes them I will share the details of the material used.

The next action we will take in our transforming our lawn to food will be to add another 5×15 row to the garden and building 3-5 more garden boxes. We plan to add the 5×15 row first since all we need for that is compostable paper bags (i.e. grocery bags) and leaves. The cost for this will be $0. By the end of September I hope to report back with news of garden boxes.

What I am currently doing to transform the lawn to a garden

1. Collecting seeds in the garden from wildflowers sowed last year so I can plant more in the additional beds. Most wildflowers draw beneficial insects to the garden and they are an easy and no-fuss way to add color.

2. We try to spray the leaf piles once a day. Keeping the leaves moist will help them break down faster, giving us rich soil to plant in sooner.

3. We take note of friends and neighbors who have plants that can use dividing or thinning. We are set up to dig out some more nice raspberry stock when the weather is cooler and I collected some Columbine (aquilegia) seeds as just walking down the sidewalk. It was easy, just pinch the seed head right off, all you need is two or three.

Are you ready to transform?

Let us know if you have any questions and subscribe to our feed if you want to stay current on our garden plans. We would love to help with ideas and encourage you to get started on turning your lawn into a beautiful and highly functional area that can sustain you and your family. You can even send us a picture of the area you want to transform with your needs and limitations and we’ll post it to the site with some ideas you can consider.