Island views

What does a woofing host does when he manages to snatch a few days holidays out of a super busy schedule?
I chose to go woofing in West Cork with Tim and Sandra.

I had heard of them from a common friend, Graham Strouts, and had looked at their listing on Helpxnet a few times. The main attraction was that Tim is a very experienced beekeeper, and woofing there looked like a good way to learn a bit about beekeeping before getting our own bees.
As it turned out, there’s a lot more at Tim and Sandra’s place than just beekeeping. Sandra is an experienced horse woman, and they keep two working horses. On the second day, I helped with some horse ploughing, and, one thing leading to another, we decided to put up a website for working horses in Ireland, to which they will (hopefully) contribute.
Another project that I helped with, and which I found most interesting, not to say inspiring, what the building of their home made polytunnel.

Anybody who has visited our place knows that I am very enthousiastic about polytunnels. They extend the growing season, open up new possibilities, such as aubergines, grapes or butternuts squash, who simply won’t grow outdoor in Ireland. They make easy work of growing tomatoes, French beans or cucumber, which is somewhat dodgy outdoor. Out of our tunnel, we get potatoes, strawberries and fresh peas in May, basil and tomatoes all summer long, salads in the middle of the winter. Gardening, even the middle of the winter on a showery day, is a real pleasure when you’re warm and dry. Need I go on? They’re great.
The problem is, they’re expensive. We paid over 4000 euros for our large one (a 7×12 m commercial tunnel).

Being somewhat short of money, but wanting a decent size polytunnel all the same, Tim got the idea of building one from recycled scafholding. I must say that the final (?) result is quite impressive. He managed to build a 40 sq m tunnel for a fraction of the price of a similar sized commercial tunnel. The only bit he bought new was the plastic cover (100 euros) and a few rolls of tapes and wire. The structure is made of recycled scafholding, which, given the state of the building industry in Ireland, can probably be picked up quite cheaply (unless of course all unemployed builders start growing vegetables under cover) with a few pieces of ply and a few length of 4×2 on top, held together with galvaband where needed.
Tim came up with an ingenious solutions to the problem of tensioning the plastic cover, rolling the loose end over a plastic pipe and tying the lot to the structure with a few loops of steel wire.

It was also very easy to make shelves for propagation, simply by cutting a scafholding transom in 2 and and putting one of the board over it. Neat, very strong, and easy to move or remove.

What’s more, the resulting tunnel is higher than ours, and ideal for fruit trees and starting a forest garden under cover, something I have been thinking about for a while.
Come to think of it, Polydome (from which we bought our first two tunnels) might well have lost a customer last week through no fault of their own, although I will probably wait to hear how Tim’s tunnel survive the winter gales before making a decision concerning our next one. But we had quite a bit of wind while I was down there, and while the plastic flapped a bit (nothing unusual), the structure looked very sturdy, and quite capable of coping with the worst of Irish winter weather, so it could well be that my next tunnel ends up being a home made one as well.

Christophe