The polytunnel… It lives!

Finally it’s up and covered! Still needs some tidying and a few bits tweaking, bit it’s ready for plants!

Stepping back a bit, it’s been hard work and not necessarily as simple the instructions would have you believe – are things ever?! – but the next one will be much easier to put up. Not that I’m volunteering to help anyone, I’m too knackered for that!

So after Pythagoras, I managed to get the frame up on my own:

Hoops in place, located on foundation tubes, which in turn are located on anchor plates buried under the ground.

 

Ridge bar now in place. At this point I made my one and only ‘support’ call to First Tunnels to check on the fact it didn’t appear to be that straight. Not a major problem apparently and should sort itself out when the cover is put on, so I ploughed on.

Corner stabilisers now in place.

At this stage I called in some help from my Dad, him being far more practically minded than me. And also retired so readily available. This enabled us to get most of the timber in place for the doors (and get the cover round the wrong way on them!) and for the base rails, and put on most of the anti hot spot tape:

After which all I needed to do was put on the battens to create the rebate for the cover and put the cover on. Yes that’s all…! More reinforcements were called in and to cut a long and tiring story short, it’s up:

As I said, it needs some tweaking with the cover  – I’ve still got to fine tune the base rails to tighten the cover further – and the remains of the cover needs tidying up, but it should be open for business very shortly.

I have plenty of tomatoes and chillies to go in there, and fortunately I acquired almost 70 large plant pots the other day courtesy of the house near the kids school which had recently been raided for growing cannabis plants! And the thing is my haul was but a fraction of what was being cleared out of that house :>o The compost was destined for other places, but mustn’t grumble.

And now to bed…