News: Paradise Farm's Hoop House
- Lisa is now growing tomatoes in her hoop house and they're looking beautiful!
- Paradise Farm's 2nd hoop house has been built and will be planted later this year. Stop by the Dahlem Ecology Farm to see for yourself!
Hoop House at the Dahlem Center
Lisa Brown is the owner of Paradise Farms, a
Jackson-based business. She is growing food year-round in two 96 ft long
hoop houses, which are greenhouse-like structure that greatly extend the growing
season. Lisa now sells her produce to Allegiance Health through the 4 Seasons Produce Co-op.
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Articles
Jackson Co-op Members Extend Growing Season with Hoop House
Published: Thursday, March 17, 2011, 6:00 AM
Jackson Citizen Patriot
By, Monetta Harr
4 Seasons Produce Co-op
Lisa Brown looked over her fledgling spinach plants more than two months ago and admitted with brutal honesty: “I’ve done about everything wrong.”
It’s all part of the steep learning curve in growing crops in a “hoop house,” a plastic-encased structure used to grow crops year-round. The houses are heated only by the sun.
Citizen Patriot | Katie RauschLisa Brown and other founding members of 4 Seasons Produce Co-op grow spinach and other vegetables in a hoop house.Brown, of Jackson, received a $10,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a 96-by-30-foot hoop house situated on Dahlem Center property on Wickwire Road. She and seven friends put it up last year.
“We had to wait for a calm day because the slightest wind would send us like a kite,” she said.
She then planted green peppers and tomatoes.
Green peppers proved to be a mistake, because they didn’t bring enough money in sales. But tomatoes did well, and fellow members of the co-op Brown belongs to, Four Seasons Produce, learned spinach is also a bumper item.
“You can have three to four crops of spinach before it goes to seed when it gets too hot,” said Brown, who has a degree in commercial horticulture from Michigan State University.
Brown said she was a month late in getting spinach planted for this year — it should have been planted in October, not November — and Brown said she was lucky it germinated.
A different way to grow
Learning all this takes time, according to Phil Tocco, an agriculture educator with Jackson County’s Michigan State University, because learning to grow vegetables in a hoop house is not intuitive.
“A hoop house has different diseases, bugs, ways of irrigation compared to an open field. In a field you have wind and inputs of liquid, whether overnight dew or rain,” Tocco said.
Citizen Patriot | Katie RauschNearly mature spinach awaits harvest in Lisa Brown's hoop house.Hoop houses were introduced to Michigan about three years ago by the Mott Group that’s affiliated with MSU.
Now there are four hoop houses in Jackson County, as well as many more in the state.
Many hoop houses are funded through the United States Department of Agriculture, which pays up to $11,000 per hoop house.
The funding plus an interest in buying locally grown food are driving the popularity of hoop houses.
Brown sells some of her produce at the Green Market she co-founded on Wednesday afternoons in an Allegiance Health parking lot at E. Michigan Avenue and State Street.
The market sells mainly organic foods.
In addition, she and Four Seasons Produce members sell foods to Allegiance Health.
Mark DeNato, director of hospitality services at the hospital, said last year he purchased tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, squash and spinach, most of which was put out on the cafeteria salad bar.
“It’s all part of a ‘Healthy Foods Initiative’ with the Michigan Hospital Association. Members pledge to do things differently to get healthy foods into hospitals, like purchase foods locally when we can,” DeNato said.
Plus for Michigan
Hoop houses will prove to be a boon in several ways for Michigan growers, Tocco said.
“The one resource we lack is a warm winter like California, so we are looking for any way to cheat Mother Nature. Hoop houses are passive solar systems, which means they are not heated. They capture heat through sunlight,” Tocco said.
In Brown’s hoop house on a cloudy January morning, with the outside temperature at 14 degrees, it was 29 degrees inside. The day before, a sunny day, Brown said it was 40 degrees inside at mid-morning and 70 degrees by afternoon.
Michigan’s water supply is an advantage compared to California’s lack of water.
“When the cost of water gets high enough in California, farmers are selling their land to residential customers. And you can imagine water will continue to be a premium product in the West and southwest,” Tocco said. “Right now, we in Michigan are looking at a great opportunity: we are the Saudi Arabia of water, a nice place to be.”
Published: Thursday, March 17, 2011, 6:00 AM
Jackson Citizen Patriot
By, Monetta Harr
4 Seasons Produce Co-op
Lisa Brown looked over her fledgling spinach plants more than two months ago and admitted with brutal honesty: “I’ve done about everything wrong.”
It’s all part of the steep learning curve in growing crops in a “hoop house,” a plastic-encased structure used to grow crops year-round. The houses are heated only by the sun.
Citizen Patriot | Katie RauschLisa Brown and other founding members of 4 Seasons Produce Co-op grow spinach and other vegetables in a hoop house.Brown, of Jackson, received a $10,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a 96-by-30-foot hoop house situated on Dahlem Center property on Wickwire Road. She and seven friends put it up last year.
“We had to wait for a calm day because the slightest wind would send us like a kite,” she said.
She then planted green peppers and tomatoes.
Green peppers proved to be a mistake, because they didn’t bring enough money in sales. But tomatoes did well, and fellow members of the co-op Brown belongs to, Four Seasons Produce, learned spinach is also a bumper item.
“You can have three to four crops of spinach before it goes to seed when it gets too hot,” said Brown, who has a degree in commercial horticulture from Michigan State University.
Brown said she was a month late in getting spinach planted for this year — it should have been planted in October, not November — and Brown said she was lucky it germinated.
A different way to grow
Learning all this takes time, according to Phil Tocco, an agriculture educator with Jackson County’s Michigan State University, because learning to grow vegetables in a hoop house is not intuitive.
“A hoop house has different diseases, bugs, ways of irrigation compared to an open field. In a field you have wind and inputs of liquid, whether overnight dew or rain,” Tocco said.
Citizen Patriot | Katie RauschNearly mature spinach awaits harvest in Lisa Brown's hoop house.Hoop houses were introduced to Michigan about three years ago by the Mott Group that’s affiliated with MSU.
Now there are four hoop houses in Jackson County, as well as many more in the state.
Many hoop houses are funded through the United States Department of Agriculture, which pays up to $11,000 per hoop house.
The funding plus an interest in buying locally grown food are driving the popularity of hoop houses.
Brown sells some of her produce at the Green Market she co-founded on Wednesday afternoons in an Allegiance Health parking lot at E. Michigan Avenue and State Street.
The market sells mainly organic foods.
In addition, she and Four Seasons Produce members sell foods to Allegiance Health.
Mark DeNato, director of hospitality services at the hospital, said last year he purchased tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, squash and spinach, most of which was put out on the cafeteria salad bar.
“It’s all part of a ‘Healthy Foods Initiative’ with the Michigan Hospital Association. Members pledge to do things differently to get healthy foods into hospitals, like purchase foods locally when we can,” DeNato said.
Plus for Michigan
Hoop houses will prove to be a boon in several ways for Michigan growers, Tocco said.
“The one resource we lack is a warm winter like California, so we are looking for any way to cheat Mother Nature. Hoop houses are passive solar systems, which means they are not heated. They capture heat through sunlight,” Tocco said.
In Brown’s hoop house on a cloudy January morning, with the outside temperature at 14 degrees, it was 29 degrees inside. The day before, a sunny day, Brown said it was 40 degrees inside at mid-morning and 70 degrees by afternoon.
Michigan’s water supply is an advantage compared to California’s lack of water.
“When the cost of water gets high enough in California, farmers are selling their land to residential customers. And you can imagine water will continue to be a premium product in the West and southwest,” Tocco said. “Right now, we in Michigan are looking at a great opportunity: we are the Saudi Arabia of water, a nice place to be.”
Financial Study of Hoop House Startups
Dahlem Ecology Farm - 1427 Wickwire Rd - Jackson, MI 49201
