What we learned from building a high tunnel

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The high tunnel is a ubiquitous piece of farm infrastructure for good reason. It extends the growing season and presents a versatile structure that can keep up with a farm’s evolving production and storage needs.

So useful is the high tunnel that an overwhelming number of businesses and resources exist to help you get one, or build one of your own. Indeed, it is the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to high tunnels that garners particular popularity with claims of dramatic cost savings (a high tunnel for $150!), minimal labour (build it by yourself!) and low construction times (done in a weekend!).

But as with any DIY project, beneath the cheap-and-easy surface lie choices, challenges, surprises and setbacks that you will wish you knew before. If you’re thinking about adding a high tunnel to your farm for the first time, you may wonder: What is it actually like to build one?

Over four months last year, my family answered that question when we constructed our first 14.5’ x 32’ high tunnel. The project was a success, but not without variables that affected the build time and cost, and which could have jeopardized the project’s feasibility.

Our story can’t determine whether a DIY high tunnel is right for you, but we hope it gives you the tools to arrive at the right answer.  

Identifying need, finding balance

My mom, Lorna Jackson, owns Ninebark Farm, a two-acre operation on southern Vancouver Island that raises chickens and sheep, produces plant-dyed silk ribbon and grows more than 30 varieties of cut flowers and shrubs. Lorna knew early on that, despite farming in a mild climate, she needed a high tunnel to meet florist demand for specialty varieties early, and late, in the growing season.

But when she considered her options, she was flummoxed. To have a high tunnel shipped and fully assembled by a team from the manufacturer was out of her budget. She had no regular employees and couldn’t count on consistent access to borrowed labour to assemble a kit (a shipment of most of the parts you need to assemble the tunnel) or build a tunnel from scratch. And other farmers, echoing her own knowledge, warned against investing in cheap products built from PVC pipe that wouldn’t stand up to wind or snow.

She was stuck in a way that’s familiar to Brandon Youst, founder of Bootstrap Farmer, which sells DIY greenhouse materials and kits in the United States and ships some materials to Canada. “It’s about costing,” he says. “I can’t afford to buy something that’s going to break or blow away in the wind, but I also can’t spend a fortune (on a top-of-the-line high tunnel). How do you find that balance?”

Lorna found that balance by chance when I moved back to my home community late last year with my husband, Matt Gubernat, a methodical and keen handyperson with experience in metal fabrication. I don’t know that a psychologist would recommend bonding with an in-law over a high-stakes construction project, but Lorna and Matt agreed that her needs and his cooperation meant that a high tunnel was finally feasible.

Choices, materials

Youst knows that identifying a need for a high tunnel is just the first in a series of decisions that will affect the building’s utility, and that only the farmer can make those decisions.

“We can provide the tools but there is no shortcut for learning your market, what your goals are, your crop planning. The farmer needs to decide. We’ll never have enough information to tell them what to do or what size they should build,” he says.

To define her needs, Lorna asked questions like: How strong are the winds in my area? Is wet, heavy snow likely? How deep is the frost line? How many stems of what varieties does my business plan say I need to produce in the next several years and how much room will that require? Do I need to use motorized equipment in the tunnel? What ventilation do I need so my flowers don’t cook? What size of tunnel will allow me to continue keeping livestock on my small field? How will a tunnel support my commitment to no-till growing?

Other important questions related to her physical abilities and her status as the farm’s sole operator.

“Some of the choices have to do with me being 64 years old with some body disintegration,” she says. “How will a high tunnel be easier for someone who wants to be independent and profitable for another 10 years?”

The answer was a high tunnel with a gothic-style roof built with galvanized top rail (metal pipe), a relatively small footprint and a design that could accommodate customizations such as sides that roll up via hand crank and end walls that hold double doors.

The degree of desired customization ruled out most high tunnel kits, and the ones left were too costly (the high end of kits in this size is around $10,000). Lorna and Matt turned to DIY, intrigued by the many resources that claim it’s the best way to save time and money. Because this was Matt’s first time putting his skills towards a high tunnel, the DIY approach presented an acceptable trade-off: Matt would gain an engaging learning opportunity and modest compensation from Lorna, and she would benefit from his donated time for the bulk of the project.

They opted for a popular DIY method that involves purchasing a metal hoop bender − a tool that helps the user segment-bend 1 3/8” galvanized top rail to a consistent radius. Hoop bender manufacturers often include detailed instructions and a parts list to help customers tackle the rest of the build.

But after several days of research, they encountered a classic Canadian conundrum: they couldn’t find a business in Canada that sold hoop benders. Instead, they sourced the tool from a large business in the United States. This meant they incurred extra costs from currency exchange and shipping rates, and received a detailed parts list that was not particularly useful, because it sourced all the materials from American wholesale companies.

This hiccup led to a time/money cost-comparison exercise that would follow Matt for the entire project. He spent a lot of time online and in stores, researching and sourcing the Canadian equivalent of each product and intuiting his own substitutions when a comparable product wasn’t available. When he searched hard for the best prices, he found them at wholesale business that often weren’t set up to sell, for example, 10 pieces of top rail to one person. He had to make several phone calls before he found a local fencing business willing to sell retail quantities of top rail at wholesale prices. Other times, he opted for the easiest solution, not the cheapest, because he was spending days researching prices and not progressing with the build.

With the time Matt spent sourcing materials, we wondered whether the problem could have been avoided by purchasing a kit. I asked Liz McLean, of Butternut Creek Flowers in Kingston, Ontario, after seeing her Instagram post of a 25’ x 48’ high tunnel frame that she built from a kit manufactured by a Canadian company.

She thought that a kit would be the cheapest way to make her fast-approaching fall planting deadline and avoid scrambling to find labour and parts, but she was surprised to discover that the kit didn’t include everything she needed.

“The company made it sound like [the kit] is everything you need to put it up,” she says. “I didn’t know I had to buy two-by-fours for a frame. I found that out when I looked at the instructions.”

When she gathered two nephews and three neighbours to help assemble the kit, expecting to finish in a day, the complex and unclear instructions pushed back the completion date by weeks.

“It had the worst directions. It took all day to do the frame, and we still weren’t really clear. We called the company and they gave us a YouTube video to watch and put it together. If I hadn’t pulled up the video on my phone in the field they wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did,” she says.

Liz is happy with the final product, calling it a “game changer” for her business. However, she’s disappointed at how the time and cost compared to her expectations. She estimates the kit cost her $5,400.

“If I have to buy a second one, at least now I know what to expect. For the amount of money, I kind of thought this was just awful.”

Workarounds, expertise

The challenges for Matt and Lorna didn’t end with sourcing the right materials. Because the parts

were not designed for high tunnels specifically, Matt needed to perform workarounds to use them. For example, the galvanized top rail—necessary to prevent corrosion and rust—is designed for fencing, and didn’t fit inside the extension bars that came with the hoop bender. Matt spent two hours with a neighbouring farm’s bench grinder to fix them.

Other workarounds were more expensive. Lorna’s farm doesn’t have a vehicle that can carry long

From Lorna’s perspective as the farm owner, these workarounds added a surprising amount of time that would have made the project infeasible if Matt was her paid, hourly employee. And even though he donated much of his time, there was still an opportunity cost to the hours he spent finding solutions to unforeseen challenges.

“The whole rest of the farm is still going,” Lorna says. “You can’t have all your labour going to [the high tunnel] because there’s so much else to do. But it wants to take all your time.”

Matt adds that the range of materials he used and the workarounds he devised demanded a lot

of his building knowledge and skills. “You need a realistic understanding of construction,” he says. “Can you build a deck? Do you know how to drill through metal? Then you can probably build a high tunnel. But you have to be able to figure out certain things on your own, intuit some of the steps and jump to your own conclusions.”

“You just bought a bunch of stuff that wasn’t even made for a high tunnel and now you’ve destroyed its original function. You can’t just re-use it and salvage the losses.”

“Was this because I was an idiot, or because even a smart person couldn’t anticipate these challenges?”

Lorna asked this question as I helped her fill her new high tunnel with ranunculus, sweet peas and anemones. Now complete, the tunnel took around 40 hours of build time. Lorna paid Matt $1,000 for that work, and the materials cost just over $4,000 (what Lorna hoped to pay). The time they spent on research—the project’s learning curve—was donated, and Matt’s driving time was donated, too, because he tried to combine materials shopping with other errands. The result is what Lorna needed to plant tender product that will be ready for Mother’s Day.

She and Matt have questioned the thoroughness of their research, the quality of the deals they found and the choices they made. They knew that others, like Liz McLean, encountered similar challenges, but was there a problem-free route they’d missed?

I called Loy Robinson, owner of Lost Creek Greenhouse Solutions in Mineola, Texas to find out.

Loy invented a hoop bender and has helped DIY enthusiasts tackle their own high tunnel projects since 1994. His family-run business operates buildmyowngreenhouse.com and hoopbenders.net, supplying materials, tools and resources to customers around the world.

I asked Loy if he fields many questions from people like us who encounter difficulties after starting a project.

“Every day,” he says immediately. “I had one 65-year-old grandma, she built a 20’ x 48’ in upstate New York with the help of her 14-year-old grandson and she called me every day for three weeks . . . I would say for almost 100 per cent of these people it’s their first time, that they’ve ever attempted a greenhouse, or they tried one out of PVC and they failed and they’re nervous about trying it again. After sales help, it’s a big part of our business.”

So, these people encounter unexpected time costs like we did?

“I had a customer three or four days ago call and say ‘I want to go into town and I want to get everything so I don’t have to go get one item at a time.’ You ain’t going to get it all in one trip. It just ain’t going to happen. But I itemized the list for him and sure enough he called me back a couple days later and said ‘I’ve already been in town four times.’”

What about surprise expenses?

“I tell people, ‘Tabulate all your costs and then add a minimum of 20 per cent to that. Calculate the time it’s going to take to build the project, then triple that. Don’t set that timeframe if you don’t know, and if you haven’t done it before you really don’t know.’

Loy made it clear; these are the inherent complexities of DIY, but it may still be a worthwhile approach for those who want to control expenses and build self-sufficiency. Plus, he points out, once you’ve built one high tunnel you have the skills and knowledge to build the next one faster, cheaper and better.

Lorna can already see needing another high tunnel in the not-too-distant future, and she believes DIY is still the best way to get what she needs, as long as she has a “handy, decisive and patient problem-solver like Matt” to shepherd the project. She adds that the challenges she and Matt endured, the complexities of DIY, are part of what it means to run a farm.

“No part of farming is anything but that. It’s all about not being able to anticipate challenges, learning from mistakes, trial and error. That’s why farmers are so bloody smart.”  

— Lily Jackson

Advice for planning your DIY tunnel 

Understand realistic ways to save

• “You can save up to as much as 70 per cent of a factory kit (by doing DIY). Not that every person is going to save that; a lot of country and city people have stuff laying around that could be used. The average saving is about 50 per cent.” – Loy Robinson

• “Big box retail stores are set up to sell small amounts of materials and they price those materials accordingly. A wholesaler or local supplier will save you money on the amount of product you require, but you should expect to spend extra time doing the research and legwork to find them.” – Matt Gubernat

• “There’s tons of advice out there on how to save money. Use an old trampoline frame to build your hoops, make the frame out of old scaffolding, buy a regular pipe bender and do all the calculations yourself. Understand that none of these are quick and easy fixes. Anticipate unique challenges and costs with all approaches.” – Matt Gubernat

Know your needs

• “Be really sure about what your conditions are and what to expect weather-wise. Don’t cheap out. Respect your climate. Don’t expect the snow not to fall just because you don’t want it to.” – Lorna Jackson

• “Build a small greenhouse. A 12’ x 24’ is an easy greenhouse to build. It’s strong and durable and costless to heat for a year or two. You learn how to build a greenhouse for a lot less money and you also learn how to manage a greenhouse. Say fifteen years down the road you’ve got 20 acres of greenhouses, you’ll always use the tiny one if, for nothing else, to start seeds in.” – Loy Robinson

• “Line everything up. Things like the wood for the frame and a whole bunch of little things that are similar whether you’re doing it yourself or whether you bought a kit.” – Liz McLean

Assess your DIY aptitude

• “There’s some people, they don’t have the basic skills and are not DIY-minded people. They don’t have the motor skills and are too easily frustrated. If you don’t do DIY projects very often I would say you’re not suited for it.” – Loy Robinson

• “Watch a couple videos. If you can see yourself doing it, then once you’re familiar with the process it becomes fun. Then you’ll see all the possibilities you can do.” – Brandon Youst

Understand the challenges of labour

• “Be honest with how available your labour is. If it’s volunteer labour, can they all be there on the same day? Be realistic about how much help you have available knowing that you may not be able to do it yourself.” – Lorna Jackson

• “One mistake I run across is a customer will come up and say, ‘I need everything by Friday because I’ve got ten people coming on Saturday.’ I’ve got to be honest with you, you can’t put up a greenhouse on a Saturday with ten people. For moral support and for physical assistance it’s always handy to have another pair of hands. But some people can get too many hands on board.” – Loy Robinson

Be generous with time

• “Regardless of which approach you take, give yourself a lot of lead time. Give yourself a full season, even, to get it done before you start using it.” – Lorna Jackson

— Lily Jackson