MONACA, Pa. — The Penn State Beaver high tunnel is ready for another cold weather season.
The tunnel is a 96-foot long, hoop-like greenhouse that offers enough protection from the elements for hearty flowers to be grown during the cold weather, and more delicate produce can be grown in the spring and summer months.
The produce and flower grown in the tunnel are put to good use. The Brodhead Bistro incorporates herbs into meals. Each fall the Student Farm Club holds produce sales, and in the spring, they sell seedlings. In November, flowers were harvested and donated to the Families Matter Food Pantry for the Thanksgiving holiday.
In early July, Glenn Bupp, a Penn State Extension horticulture educator, worked with Beaver campus faculty, staff and students to remove the thick plastic, referred to as the skin, that covers the high tunnel. They were joined by Randy and Cam Soergel of Soergel Orchards in Wexford.
Bupp said Cam Sorgel is the greenhouse manager for the orchards and is very knowledgeable about high tunnels and has a passion for making such structures better. Bupp said he was mentioning the project at Beaver to Soergel, and Soergel volunteered to assist in the reskinning.
The high tunnel, which sits on the hill above Harmony Hall, was constructed in 2018 with a Penn State seed grant. When Soergel saw the structure in July, he said he realized there was a better way to reskin it that would make future recovering projects much easier.
“They (the Soergels) put that professional eye on it. It was a great partnership there,” Bupp said.
Bupp said the covering on the original structure was screwed into wood that was deteriorating. Soergel recommended using an aluminum frame containing a channel and a “wiggle wire” that acts almost like a zipper to hold the plastic in place with tension.
Maintenance staff at Beaver did the prep work over the past month, and the group put the new plastic in place Thursday morning. The whole process from prepping the plastic to securing the plastic in the track took less than two hours to complete.
Associate Professor of Biology Sarah Nilson said the ends of the high tunnel will not be covered in plastic until the fall because it would get too hot inside of the structure right now.