This is for commercial crop for a market garden. It's a small one person farm. I am trying to find resources specifically for my area. I would like to use the hoophouse to my advantage. I am willing to experiment with new or interesting crops as well learn to grow the usual crops.

Thanks

Hello, thanks for reaching out! Hoophouses do open up some opportunities in the shoulder seasons. The most common approaches place cool-season crops in the fall, and warm-season crops in the spring. The main reason for this is that warm-season crops need a longer growth period to harvest, and getting them started earlier for an earlier harvest requires season extension in the spring. Then for cool-season and frost-tolerant crops the fall is a common choice because the soils are still warm enough for quick germination and growth so that they approach or reach a marketable size before a lack of light and heat stop growth all together (~ Nov 20). The crops basically sit like in a refrigerator and you harvest them as you need them until we get more than 10 hours of light again (~Feb 15). Pages 12 and 13 of the MIFMA Hoophouse Production and Marketing Guide are a good reference for this.

But it does not have to happen in that order! In an unheated hoophouse you could start direct-seeding the cool-season stuff again by mid- to late-Feb. Sometimes biennials will be tricked into going to seed because they accumulate enough chill hours to go reproductive at night even as small plants, and then get amplified heat from the sun in the day racing them to flower, but this doesn’t always happen. You will find that any fall-planted cool-season crop will go to seed pretty quickly if they make it through to the early spring because they are getting the signals to complete their life cycle and have already done all the growing and bulking that biennial plants do. In a heated and ventable hoophouse you can have a little better control of the temperature swings, but a low-tech option is an inflated double-layer of plastic as your main sheathing (a good idea for any hoophouse) and fabric row covers inside to provide extra insulation when it’s really cold that can be removed when it gets hot. If you intend to plant a warm-season crop in the same hoophouse as the cool-season plants, be sure to leave or make space between them transplanting by April. I have seen this done with good success with tomatoes transplanted between established rows of beets and lettuce. The shorter leaf/root crop occupies a lower canopy than the taller fruiting crop. Of course, you could also put them in separate beds.

The MIFMA guide linked above covers all of the best-performing crops. The biggest money makers are tomatoes and cut greens. Sweet potatoes make an amazing late summer/fall weed barrier if you have room to rotate into another area and let the sweet potatoes run wild. Ginger and turmeric are possible to grow in hoophouses here, but the end result is quite different from what you would find in a store. The roots are not fully matured and cured, with a stronger flavor. This ginger synopsis from the Organic Veg Conference is helpful for ginger.

Ben Werling and Ben Phillips are the Vegetable Extension people closest to you and would be happy to continue this conversation over email or phone! The information above came from Ben Phillips.

Thank you so much for the information. This was above and beyond what I expected, but exactly what I was looking for. I will definitely look into the links. 

Thanks again

Our pleasure. Enjoy the weekend! =)