Our late fall season is filled with projects with everything from pulling up landscape fabric, to cleaning and organizing supplies that we will reuse next season. This week we're working on our caterpillar tunnels.
We've been lucky this fall with quite a few really nice days so that we could make some major improvements to our caterpillar tunnel end walls. One major frustration I've had the past few years is with our "zipper door" end walls. The doors just aren't rugged enough to stand up to the winds we have here and on top of that, the zippers frequently got caught in the plastic making both opening and closing the doors a real pain.
So to reinforce and improve while also reuse the zipper doors we have we're adding upright posts, a header, and a kick board to secure the plastic to. The upright posts are sunk into the ground about two feet and then attached to the bow of the tunnel with a metal fastener and lots of screws. The kick board will be attached to the posts and the end bow. We'll then secure the zipper door plastic to the posts and boards with wiggle wire channel. Finally, we'll frame out new doors, attach wiggle wire channel and plastic and attach them to the posts.
All of this should greatly increase the strength of our end walls and tunnels in general and make it easier to open and close end wall doors. We'll have the final results on display this spring when we re-attach the plastic. Stay tuned!
