Growing Vegetables in a Polytunnel

Living on the South Island of New Zealand has many benefits but a long hot summer is not one them. This is precisely what tomato plants need to produce nice red juicy tomatoes. When we planted our little tomato plants in raised beds the first year, we kept an eye on the weather report. Every time, when frost was predicted, I went out and cover all the little plants with plastic containers. I did this for 2 weeks and then one afternoon, while nobody was home, a hail storm went by. Well, what can I say? That was more or less the end of those plants.

We replanted and saved ones we could but even though we cared for them well, the crop was disappointing. I picked a two liter ice-cream container full of almost red tomatoes which I took inside to ripen. A heavy unseasonal frost took care of the rest. It was clear that we needed to make a better plan if we wanted to grow our own tomatoes.

We decided to take a two way approach. One solution was to grow tomatoes in containers under a roof overhang against a north facing wall. This wall gets sun most of the day as we live in the southern hemisphere. You can read about the success of this process in my lens on Raised bed vegetable growing (http://www.squidoo.com/raisedbedvegetablegrowing). The other option was to look into putting up a greenhouse or using a polytunnel.