It is finished!! The Polytunnel!

[dexterdoglancashire]

Shelley, it looks fantastic! Well done! Hope you have many happy hours playing and growing in there.
Bernie

[ardroil]

oh your so lucky, I WANT ONE OF THOSE......

[RedThorn]

It look great! Nice to stand back and see the fruits of you labour.... especially when it will bear fruit later (ok and veggies )

[Hooky]

That looks like a very professional job!

I would have preferred a poly tunnel - but the oh would have buried me in the remaining slither of lawn.

LOL!!

Alan

[Duronal]

Wow, great job! it look like a huge tunnel of prosperity

As a handy hint if you didn't get crop bars you can use rope tied onto the inside of the hoops to act as a 'bar' to tie support lines onto to. This is great for providing tomato or cucumber support.

Something else worth trying is suspending lightweight plants in between the hoops to act as a hanging shelf. This is dead handy for seedlings or storing things out of the way.




Because i had nothing better to do I've also just calculated that your tunnel should produce approx 26.271 Litres for every even mm of rain per side. If you used a kit like this Two Wests - Please enable your cookies to catch it you'd certainly keep your watering costs down to a minimum.

in fact this means that you could fill a blu barrel water butt with 11mm of rain..........That's a phenominal return! Be warned though , if we had a really rainly day 30mm or so you'd produce enough water to irrigate a small field! (approx 780 litres/side)

Still it all look amazing.

Take it easy

D

[OverWyreGrower]

Because i had nothing better to do I've also just calculated that your tunnel should produce approx 26.271 Litres for every even mm of rain per side. If you used a kit like this Two Wests - Please enable your cookies to catch it you'd certainly keep your watering costs down to a minimum.

in fact this means that you could fill a blu barrel water butt with 11mm of rain..........That's a phenominal return! Be warned though , if we had a really rainly day 30mm or so you'd produce enough water to irrigate a small field! (approx 780 litres/side)

We had thought about guttering (after standing in there for 30 mins watching the water on the polythene)... Those gutters from TwoWests look great, but we'll have to save up a bit more to afford enough for both sides of the tunnel (as it's 30ft long!)

[taff]

so...when are you coming round to install one in my garden then?

[I could sit on the grass now and match colours]

[Duronal]

i wondered whether or not some cable trunking would do the same job? something like this perhaps. Of course you'd also have to use some repair tape to hold it place but it could work......

http://www.homestead.co.uk/productca...tegoryid=55661

[PaddyPolytunnel]

looks fantastic. I'm in the process of putting together a 15 * 8ft one myself. Same problem with job taking me away from it so expect it will be another couple of weeks before I get it up.

Any tips?

For the watering we just put in a double water butt. Over 300 litres and I was worried they'd never fill. One night of our lovely galway rain and both overflowing! I'm laying underground watering hose (cheapo lidl jobie but should help me a bit) which I should be able to link to one of the butts.

[OverWyreGrower]

Polytunnel Tips!

looks fantastic. I'm in the process of putting together a 15 * 8ft one myself. Same problem with job taking me away from it so expect it will be another couple of weeks before I get it up.

Any tips?

Give yourself as much time as possible!
Check all your parts before starting (we had several small, but important, parts missing)
Read the instructions, then read them again, then read them again
Use anti-hot-spot tape

The measuring of the base and getting it exactly square took us longer than expected, but it is one of the most important bits of the build. If it's wrong, the rest of the tunnel will be difficult to build.

Ideally you need 2 people to do this, 3 is better! It also helps if one or both of you is over 5ft 6ins. It would go quicker if your helper was of the same technical ability as you (I am not very good with building things, so OH did it mainly with me 'helping').

From start to finish, the covering of the tunnel (incl. fixing to base rails) took about 4 hours (with just OH nailing them). It's really important to get it as tight as you possibly can, and then some.

[Alison]

Am hoping that OH will be of great help in the assembly of ours, he's very good at that sort of thing so I tend to let him take the lead.