With A Little Help From My Friends

Some tasks require you to wrap your brain in knots to figure out how to achieve the desired result, but once solved in the mind the execution is relatively simple. Many planning exercises and logic puzzles fall into this category. Others are the opposite; it is quite simple to comprehend how it should be done but the devil is in the implementation.  Erecting a polytunnel is most definitely this latter type of job.

  

For instance the first page of instructions require you to push into the ground sixteen metal pipes, each 61cm long, two straight rows precisely fourteen feet apart, at exactly seven feet intervals, leaving just 10cm of each one poking up. The manual cannot overstress the importance of getting this right as otherwise you end up with a wonky-looking tunnel (not in these exact words of course). So I spent what seemed like days messing around in the mud with long stretches of twine to form diagonals which never seemed to quite match up, fiddling with a tape measure that was too short (5 metres) and which quickly broke anyway, whacking these pipes into compacted clay ground with a hammer over a piece of timber, several of which hit underground rocks that I had to dig out and then start again, whilst trying to re-locate the exact right spot for the pipe.  The ground was reasonably level but not quite, so of course none of the tops of the pipes were precisely the same height as each other – something the manual didn't even bother to warn about.

 

Then Thursday and Friday I had Peter over to help me make the hoops up, fit them on the pipes I'd eventually bashed into place, connect them all along the top with the ridge pipes, fasten up all the bracing pieces, door rails and crop bars, then build the wooden door frames and fit them in place. In a perfect world these door frames would be exactly aligned with the plane of the end hoops; sadly I don't live in a perfect world, and I have a feeling that once the sliding doors are on they will not slide quite how they are meant to.

Anyhow the big day arrived, Saturday. My first Volunteer Day. I had five volunteers in the end, three who drove up from Machynlleth and two from Dinas Mawddwy (Peter and a young lad he'd convinced the night before in the pub). The main goal: to put the polythene skin on the frame. It was a warm and sunny day, a relief since you cannot do this in the wet - the anti-hotspot tape wouldn't stick to the metal.

I first got some of them fitting the horizontal low wooden rails on both ends that the doors are supposed to rest against, while two others tightened all the nuts they could find. I made the tea and flustered around. In the midst of all the activities my neighbour turned up in a huge dumper truck with a gift of a mountain of horse manure which I'd agreed to take off his hands, and after the second load he found he couldn't get the machine back up my muddy track, it kept slipping off sideways. This was a big problem. I sawed down a young tree that had been getting in the way slightly, and he tried again whilst I held my breath – this time he just about made it, swearing never to bring the thing back down ever again.

The time came to put the polythene on. It was unravelled lengthways and laid next to the frame. We couldn't open it out fully due to the nearby thicket of blackthorn, but this wasn't a problem. Taking two corners it was pulled up and over and despite an inopportune gust of wind which ballooned it up threatening to lift us all up with it, we got it over and held down.

The tricky bit was getting it level in all directions and keeping it level while we tightened it lengthways, battened it at each end above the door frames, then tightening one side into the trench while it was re-filled with the soil, and doing the same on the other side. At least once we had to unfasten battens and re-tighten, and undig part of the trench to re-level it crossways. All exhausting and quite disheartening as the skin continually refused to become properly taut across the whole length. Tempers flared occasionally. We were all hot, muddy and tired. It took a lot longer than any of us expected. But by 5:30pm we had got it fixed down, except for the ends which will have to wait for another day. We could finally stand back and admire our handiwork.

Not much more has been done to it yet as I've been sowing seeds and entertaining my friend Claudio who had come all the way from the Amazon to see me and my land (and others too, I suppose). But with the skin on, it looks serious. I am the proud owner of a 49-foot polytunnel and am raring to get growing in it.