Dirt. The paths are permanent, so compaction isn't an issue. The advantage of permanent paths accumulated over time, eventually they require very little maintenance. An adjustable-width rake will be all you may need. Once your beds have reached an optimal tilth, and you learn to irrigate efficiently, muddiness isn't an issue. I use, like Elliot, narrow paths to maximize growing space and reduce the amount of labor involved for non-producing space... remember, this covered space is your most valuable growing area. My paths are 8", just enough to keep maintained with two quick swipes of a 4" collinear hoe. I've worked in Elliots hoophouses as well as my own, and narrow paths are not an impediment if production is the priority. Lumber will attract slugs, earwigs, and rodents, and will need to be replaced fairly frequently, unless it is treated, which introduces a whole 'nother set of issues. This is also true with masonry, which has the added disadvantage of being heavy when it comes time to move it. Some growers I know have a wider path down the center, or along the north side, to accommodate equipment, but most are reluctant to sacrifice any growing space. An alternative is to include in your design one or two beds that are a width that will accomodate being straddled by a garden cart, so that the wheels and legs stay in th path with the bed of the cart over the growing space. Finally, if you decide to use green manures, mechanical tillage, solarization, or winter exposure to control pests and disease, it is much easier to treat the whole area if it is all the same soil. If Elliots' 30+ years of experience can't convince you, look for Bob Flowerdews' opinion on the subject.
Title: The No-work Garden
Author: Bob Flowerdew
Format: In this comic diatribe of vitriol poured enthusiastically on the heads of experts, designers and instant garden makeovers I explain easier ways of getting more pleasure & production from your garden for much less effort or expense. Ideal for all non-expert gardeners and older hands. Now out in paperback.

Eight-inch dirt paths it is!

Thank you so much for your quick answer and the rationale behind it. And how wonderful that you have experience working with hoophouses, and even with the hoophouse legend Eliot Coleman!

One would think that since I gardened outside for 20 years that I would be able to figure out how to use a hoophouse quickly, but no! The learning curve for the many aspects of this new tool is actually quite steep!

I'll look up Bob Flowerdew's book for my next Amazon order. I am a complete sucker for gardening books.

I'm a firm believer in the importance of design, so here are a few more things to consider. The beds should be only a few inches high, to reduce moisture loss. In winter, the outer areas will likely freeze unless you sink insulation into the perimeter. Plant hardier crops there in the coldest months. I would make the beds 20' long, giving you some room to move and store things at one end. With 30" wide beds, this will give you 6 growing areas exactly 50 square feet each, making calculations for fertilizing, watering, seed ordering, and yield much simpler. I built a hinged shelf along one side that folds down and out of the way in summer. It gives me space for starting seedlings and microgreens in spring. It is 24" deep and extends almost the length of one side, there are vertical legs at each end and diagonal braces extending up from the foundation to support the middle, and holds 21 trays of seedlings. I have sliding doors at both ends, which minimizes the amount of snow you have to remove for access. My soil is double dug and sifted, a huge amount of work the first year, but this gives me uniform root crops and is very helpful when using the pinpoint seeder. I grow arugula, spinach, mizuna, mache, Hakuri turnips, carrots, and beets for cool season crops. The beets and mache share a bed (45' of each, in my case, since my houses are 96' long) the other beds are dedicated to one crop at a time. In summer I raise indeterminate heirloom tomatoes on vinyl trellis netting, undersown with basil and signet marigolds. I keep large potted rosemary and lemon verbena plants at one end, and bring them indoors in the winter. The north side of the house is where you should create storage systems to hang tools. I keep a pair of garden clogs for working in the hoop houses and try not to wear them in the main gardens, to minimize the likelihood of introducing diseases or weed seeds from outdoor sources.

Don't neglect looking at the Greenhouse forum, there are a lot of experienced hoophouse operators there.

@ bi11me. Would love to see photographs growing, seed starting. etc.

Sorry, but you'll have to wait for the book to come out. Part of the retirement plan...

*giggle*

I was thinking about doing a serious study of growing in the fun of the extreme temperature swings and clay soil of Nebraska! I couldn't imagine double-digging and sifting this stuff--I'd have to bake it in summer to dry it out so that it isn't plastic any more, and that would mean halting all growing.

Thank you for the ideas about designing the hoophouse! I've been ruminating on them during the week. I'm trying to especially figure out the fold-down shelving and tool storage.

One thing that I wanted to ask you about in particular are the south doors on the hoophouse. Due to the limited space in the back yard, the hoophouse runs north-south rather than east-west (though with such a squarish dimension it hardly matters).

The issue is that the farmer who assembled the hoophouse put enormous insulated doors on the south wall. He probably did so thinking that we could then drive our small tractor in there, but that's not anything I want to do. As a result, these six foot wide, nearly eight foot tall insulated metal doors cast a lot of shade.

{{gwi:258986}}

Should I attack changing out the doors this summer season? They do of course help with ventilation, especially in the summer when the prevailing winds are out of the south.

What would you suggest?

Also, I've got some serious hoophouse envy going on over your 96' hoophouse! ;-)

sounds like raised beds about 1 meter wide with paths about .5 to 1 meter wide, might be a good consideration?

you can go to at least 12"s high without edges.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens straw bale garden

Them's some monster doors, no argument. I assume they are metal-clad foam. There is certainly an advantage, with this orientation and the desire to grow year-round, to having transparent end walls. The simplest solution, I think, might be to have these re-installed on the other end come summer, and then ideally to put in sliding doors with double-walled polycarbonate framed in wood. The framing would be 12 feet wide - enough for two 3' doors to slide away from each other to completely expose the opening, and you could use simple barn-door hardware to hang them. Polycarbonate is not cheap, but it is durable; you could easily simply tack 6 mil clear plastic on a wood frame, or on both sides of a wood frame,or use bubble-wrap, and get a similar effect. The primary advantage of sliding doors is that it reduces snow removal chores, but if that's not an issue then the hinged doors are fine. Sliding doors also provide the advantage of being easy to adjust depending on what degree of ventilation you need. A reputable handyman could, without much trouble, refashion these doors as well, and it's not too great a task to cut out most of the center of the doors you have (assuming the metal's not too thick, and fabricating some transparent panel insets for them.

For tool storage, my ideal is a heavy gauge wire grid, mounted on the north wall, (or north end of the west wall, or from the ceiling, but it really isn't crucial) with s-hooks. Your tools would be suspended off the ground bu the hooks. The wire grid provides the least amount of shading. The shelving is mounted on the vertical posts, with the front legs and supports constructed in a way that does not impact the bed below the shelf. For your configuration I would put a hinged shelf, again using rigid wire grid in a wooden frame, on the west side of the greenhouse, giving you the option of taking advantage of the shade it will create in summer, but reducing the shading - because of the more oblique angle of the sun - in the winter. It would not impede morning sun from the east, thus gaining as much warming advantage in the winter as you could get. There are a lot of ways to do it, but most of them are easiest if you have the option of getting the plastic out of the way where the supports are to be mounted. I use this as a make-shift potting bench and seedling area in the cooler months, once it warms up outside I move my seed-starting operation to a different area.

Didn't Ruth Stout put out the No Work Garden book?

jolj, the two books have very similar titles. :)

Title: The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book
Author: Ruth Stout
Year: 1979

Title: The No-Work Garden
Author: Bob Flowerdew
Year: 2004

Ruth Stout was promoting the benefits of deep mulching. Flowerdews' intent is to debunk some of the myths that have evolved about "proper" gardening techniques that he feels are unnecessarily laborious. I don't agree with all of his assertions, but some of his methods, and more to the point the reasoning behind them, make sense.

I have no idea about growing in a hoop house, but do you have a way of getting compost/soil etc to all of your beds?
I know that was a big mistake in my raised bed garden boxes, I only made the paths about 2 ft wide and it was a big PITA to get a wheelbarrow in and turned etc without stepping in the other bed. Just a thought.
Also, you might want to look at stepables.com for some groundcovers that you can walk on, thus eliminating the slippery aspect of your paths, AND making them pretty! Nancy

Nancy--Almost everything going in and out of the hoophouse is done using 6-gallon buckets or paper grocery bags. Though a wheelbarrow might be useful sometimes, we are not really willing to sacrifice the precious growing space in order to have really wide paths. But we're bumping them up to eight inches, which will be a 33% increase from the current precarious six inches!

Polycarbonate sliding doors sound like a winner.

Today we are got about ten inches of wet, heavy snow. We've had to trudge out to the hoophouse a few times to knock the snow off to protect the plastic. I normally enter through the normal-sized north door, but that even was a challenge to get open.

If we put sliding doors on the south, then I could just trudge around to that side when it snows.

One other major item that we need to figure out is watering. I noticed in the photo on page 38 of Coleman's "Winter Harvest Handbook" what appears to be a water hose with a filter hanging down from the hoophouse supports.

Could you share any insights on the best ways to water the beds? There is no dripline to be seen. There was a mister for watercress, but not for anything else.

The issue Nancy describes of making the beds accessible is not unimportant, and that is why it is handy to have a garden cart that is sized to run over the beds. Some carts have a set of legs in front that don't permit this, but there are others that do, and it's not hard to fabricate something that will work. If you go to the Carts Vermont website and look at the different leg configurations between the medium and large sized carts you will see what I mean. Two wheeled garden carts aren't always a better choice than wheelbarrows, but in many cases, including capacity and balance, they are a vast improvement. In intensively gardened hoop-house operations they are an excellent tool.

Both Eliot and I use drip and spray irrigation. The hose you see in the picture is a thin tube that runs from a larger feeder line, and the head is designed to create a fine circular spray pattern, for some crops, these are a good choice, but it is important that you are able to ventilate properly so the foliage doesn't remain wet for too long. With a little experimentation you will discover what height and pressure will allow you to irrigate the beds but keep the paths relatively dry... this all started with the paths, remember? Sprays also offer more cooling effect, which can be a real advantage when the greenhouse is hot but the outside air temps are colder than one would wish, so ventilation for cooling purposes is less than ideal. Drip irrigation is better for less dense plantings, where you have water emitted for individual plants. You can set up your sprayers with a quick-connect system that alternates with the drip tape, or you can install a Y-fixture with shut-off valves, or you can get much more elaborate. Timers are definitely handy. If you use drip irrigation, you will frequently have to remove it when you are doing certain chores. I generally just lift the far end and pull it over one of the support bars that form the roof trusses over the beds. When I'm ready to put it back I just stretch it back out over the soil and pin the end with a wire anchor to keep it in place. In winter, your will need to do very little irrigation - air and soil moisture levels are typically much higher, and transpiration rates lower. This is good, because it means your less likely to be experiencing the joys of frozen pipes. When you won't be using the drip, it is best to drain it and store it away from sunlight and extreme temperatures, and it will last for years. I prefer the perforated tape to the "weeping" hose, but your mileage may vary.

If snow is an issue, and especially wet heavy snow, you may want to explore the possibility of having two layers of plastic with air blown in between the layers. This reduces light transmission slightly, but it provides a lot more insulation and adds a surprising amount of strength. Because the greenhouse stays warmer, the snow slides off more readily, and you will spend less time removing it. The best method I've found is to use a nylon-bristle broom to brush off the snow from the inside. Outside the greenhouse, it is good to leave a layer of snow up against the foundation, it actually provides good insulation, but you don't want it too high, because it puts a lot of pressure on the plastic. You must be VERY CAREFUL when shoveling anywhere near the plastic not to tear it, and should keep a roll of repair tape handy (but don't let it freeze).

Somewhere towards the back of the Winter Harvest Handbook there's a picture of a bunch of people in one of Eliots' greenhouses amongst a swath of fabric row covers - I think it's on page 198, but my copy is loaned to someone right now, so I can't be sure. Among that crowd there's a guy standing off to the side with bushy hair and blue jeans and a white sweater vest, looking down at the ground - that would be me.

The link below is to some quick-connect fittings that are durable and don't leak. They aren't the most affordable ones, and there is likely a cheaper source - I use this company for woodworking tools - not cheap, but excellent quality products.

Here is a link that might be useful: quick-connect hose adapters

I have a 20x20 hoop style greenhouse, 2" galvanized hoops due to snow loads here and double plastic film with a fan to keep the layers separate. Last year we were lucky to find a good deal on double walled channel polycarbonate and redid the south wall. I have 4 beds going up the sides, one bed across the back, and shorter beds on either side of the front door. Beds are raised, with 2X6's defining the edges. Last year, we remodeled our house, replacing wall-to-wall carpeting with wood floors. I cut the carpet in strips and laid down between the beds. Then, we got a load of gravel and spread that over the carpet. I got a lot of laughs from friends before the gravel arrived over our carpeted greenhouse. I also used the extra carpet between the outside raised beds.
We have hot dry summers, so the carpet and gravel helps keep the humidity in the GH. I've had this greenhouse up and running for 10 years. We only replaced the uv-plastic 2 years ago - it held up much longer than the promised 3 years.
BTW, friends of ours were able to scavenge old carpet from a carpet store dumpster.

gardenmom, do you grow year-round in there? How do you deal with irrigation in summer, and freezing in the winter?

I see you! What a svelte and dapper figure you cut! It probably comes from all that work in the gardens, and the wonderful fresh produce. I wonder what you were thinking at the moment. :)

The hoophouse is double-layered plastic with a blower fan--with the frequent high winds here I doubt the house would have survived this long without that advantage.

Here we have hot, humid summers. We get dry spells where the humidity drops, but any rain and the humidity jumps and one has to worry about fungal diseases on the plants. So I think that for summers here I'll be pretty much limited to drip irrigation to avoid wetting the leaves and raising humidity in the hoophouse. By the "perforated tape" do you mean T-tape?

Mmmmmm...repair tape. I guess we had better invest in some of that as the plastic ages.

Great idea with the carpet, gardenmom! I'd like to get the ancient carpet in the main living area replaced--if we do that soon then maybe strips of it in the hoophouse will be in order.