 I'd like to welcome you to our second in a series of 11 Wednesday webinars. My name is Julie Garden Robinson. I'll be your host and if you turn to the next slide for me Kyla, I wanted to remind you of the upcoming webinars. Next week we will feature Esther McGinnis who's an assistant professor and horticulturalist and she's going to talk about GMOs and following that on March 7th we'll have Gardening in Small Spaces with Yolanda Schmidt. So we have some great webinars coming up and I certainly hope that you'll join us. You've been exploring your own zoom controls so just that you know that you can type your questions in the chat box. I'll be keeping my eye on those. You have some answer and question controls that we've been working with and again please keep yourself muted unless later in the in the webinar you can ask a question out loud if you would like. So go to the next one. One thing that I ask and this helps me a lot because we fund these projects through special grants and we have a real short online survey and that will be emailed to you right after today's webinar. It'll take you two minutes maximum and there will be an opportunity to sign up to win a prize in a drawing. It's a pretty cool prize. I have them in my office so please go ahead and fill that out and again that helps us out because this is a grant funded project and now I'd like to introduce and thank Kyla Splickle for joining us. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Kyla. She's a horticulture research specialist at the Williston Research Extension Center. She graduated from NDSU in 2010 with a Bachelor of Science in Horticulture and a minor in Landscape Architecture. Her research involves small fruit, vegetables, hops, tree and flower research at the Williston Station and vegetable and high tunnel research at the Nessan Valley irrigation site. While her research duties keep her busy her true passion has been the designing and maintenance of the landscaping around the Williston Research Extension Center. So thank you very much for joining us and we look forward to hearing all about your high tunnel research. Thanks Julie. I appreciate the opportunity to get to share this stuff with you and yes I do have a background in design but I ended up doing this research but it's pretty fun so um and taking a look here at this photo up at the right hand corner. Thankfully we don't have that much snow this year. This was taken last year but tells you what it looks like here in North Dakota. So with that I'm going to introduce this project, this research. We were just doing the a snapshot of what we were doing here and so I'll introduce the project. I'll go through the difference between a high tunnel and a greenhouse and then I'll talk about each of the trials that we did and some of the things that we came across some of the things that we learned and then if there's time at the end we'll discuss some of the weather patterns that we saw. So with that this project was a collaborative effort between myself and my colleagues Dr. Esther McGinnis and Dr. Harleen Hatterman-Valenti in the plant science departments at Fargo. We put our heads together and decided that we were going to pursue funding from the North Dakota specialty crop block grant program and the title of our project was expanding local specialty crop opportunities in North Dakota through season extension using high tunnels. It was quite a mouthful but we had fun facilitating this research. The grant was awarded in 2015 and it allowed us to build two high tunnels representing both eastern and western North Dakota and it allowed us to conduct vegetable and cut flower research. So the project objectives were to use high tunnels to compare commercial cultivars of three traditional high tunnel crops tomatoes peppers and cucumbers. Evaluate the different varieties of high tunnel about high value cut flowers and then to create a communication center for producers using high tunnels. And I would also I would also like to go ahead and thank the folks on this slide. We we definitely have to thank the specialty crop block program for accepting this award and the Nelson Valley research team. My summer help that I had specifically Roger Pratham she is our agronomist's wife. The main campus Fargo research team and the grad students that were involved and the pathology labs both on campus and DSU and here at the Williston Research Extension Center. So you're here today to find out more about vegetables but I will touch briefly on the cut flower research and then I hope to share through some of the things that we learned along the way. So what is a high tunnel? Oftentimes are referred to as a hoop house and the terms are interchangeable but you can see that the term hoop comes from the shape. The earlier styles were structured like the one here on the top right corner and this is the high tunnel we have located at our dryland station in Williston. The term high tunnel is derived from the use of low tunnels much like the ones that are pictured here on the bottom left. So they're inexpensive non-permanent structure. They'll typically have one or two layers of poly. They are ventilated by the side walls and the end walls. You plant directly into the ground or raised beds and they need to be irrigated in some form of way, usually drip irrigation. So you're probably thinking that it looks like a greenhouse but what makes it different? Greenhouses are considered to be an actual building. You've chosen the site, you've excavated it, you put in a footing, you poured a slab and you built everything on top of that. So the structure much like a house is going to have a fully automated heating and ventilating system and temperature control. So it's more rigidly built which means there's more materials involved and that makes it more expensive. So you will typically have plants grown in pots, usually on benches. And so the photo on your right here we can see our agronomist Godum. He's watering some things in, we had some plants that we were starting. This is a greenhouse at the Agricultural Research Center in Sydney, Montana. We've got all this mechanical up here. It's much more sophisticated. Rigid poly structure looks a lot more like a house in terms of the the peak, the roof line. So why would you choose a high tunnel? Well, high tunnels have their own advantages and disadvantages. We'll talk about that on the next slide. But one of the main reasons that one might choose a high tunnel is the expense. You can return your investment faster depending on what types of crops you grow. For us in North Dakota and other temperate regions, high tunnels make sense because they extend our growing season. And more importantly, they mitigate a lot of mother nature's bipolar tendencies in the spring and fall. If you're from North Dakota up in the northwest, you know that the spring temperatures can fluctuate drastically during early spring and late fall. So high tunnels can help mitigate that. They also produce a higher quality crop by excluding significant weather events such as rain, hail, some wind protection, and they can also be used to exclude pests. So some advantages and disadvantages. You do have more control over your environment in terms of your irrigation, your fertility, temperatures, your relative humidity. You get your product earlier to market, so your market planning if you're a CSA or planning for your farmer's market. The season is more predictable compared to the field grown products. And then your quality is a lot higher. So those are some those are some advantages that we've seen. Some disadvantages, the more control you have over the environment requires more monitoring. And also a lot of humidity can get trapped up under that high tunnel in the early and late season, which can cause some disease issues that you need to look out for. Diseases and pest insects, pest issues in general, are going to be a disadvantage, something that you just need to watch out for. And the third bullet point there, protected environment attracts insect pests. Snow loads and windy conditions can also cause problems. And then the soil health and microbiology need to be monitored very carefully because these systems are typically heavily cropped or intensely cropped. So this photo here is our dryland high tunnel, a high tunnel on our dryland station in Williston. It was built in 2005 and this picture is taken from the spring of 2006. You can see that the zippered end walls did not withstand our windy conditions here. And they they do make high tunnels more structurally sound nowadays with end walls that are more rigid. These zippered plastic end walls just didn't didn't work out for us here. So in the Prairie Plain State of North Dakota, wind is our biggest contender with high tunnels. So choosing your site wisely and spending just a little bit more upfront on your materials can go a long way. So I didn't want to spend too much time going over that. What grows in a high tunnel? And the answer is pretty much everything. So over here on the left, we have our cut flowers. In the middle photo, this was a high tunnel producer in Northwest North Dakota. He had sweet corn, there was a couple sunflowers in the background. Over on the right here, this is Dr. Hatterman Valenti. She's helping us fix the end wall and we were framing it in with two by fours. And here we have a row of raspberries. So we've had fruits in there, vegetables. I know the University of Minnesota is actually doing fruit tree research where they have fruit trees growing in high tunnels. So what did we grow? On one end of our tunnel, we had what we considered a traditional high tunnel crop, tomato, cucumber, and bell pepper. And on the other, we had four species of cut flowers, Lysianthus, Dahlia, Snapdragon, and Delphinium. So the cut flower research was conducted by graduate student Jacob Clusa. And he was advised by Dr. Esther McGinnis at NDSU. And I actually hired two horticulture intern students this past season. And their names were Rose and Jasmine. So there was a running joke this past summer that your name had to be a flower in order to work with me. And here is myself and Rose. And we are cutting the flowers from each plot and taking the data. And the data that we collected for this research had to do with stem length, stem caliper, number of buds, flower diameter, and the plots were planted based on different soil temperatures. So just another snapshot of the beautiful flowers that we had growing in there. It's kind of nice to see that stuff on these cold winter days. Put a smile on your face. So where did we grow? And this is a snapshot of the state of North Dakota. And over on the right hand side near the Red River Valley, we had a high tunnel that was constructed at the Dale E. Herman Arboretum in Absaraka, North Dakota. And the other high tunnel, the one that I'm mostly talking about today, if I say Williston, I mean the Nessan Valley high tunnel that we built, it was it's built along US Highway 1804. And it's our Nessan Valley Irrigated Research and Development site. So here in Williston, at the Williston Research Extension Center, we actually have two research sites. We have a dry land site and we have an irrigated site. And there are crops that are grown under linear irrigation. And we constructed the high tunnel there. We do draw our irrigation off Lake Sakakawia here. And so we were representing the vast differences between in our climate from east versus west. So how did we do this? Well, we went ahead and constructed these high tunnels. The high tunnel at the Absaraka Arboretum was 30 feet by 96 feet. The Nessan Valley Irrigated One high tunnel was 26 by 96 feet. So we had approximately 2400 square feet to work with. Our beds were tilled, planted. We used transplants. We utilized woven landscape fabric for weed control between the rows. And then we placed one line of drip tape per row with 8 inch space emitters. And I'll show, you can see that set up in the photo at the bottom, our drip tape here. And then this was our cucumbers. We ended up using coffee cans to protect our plants after transplants because we have 13 striped ground squirrels and flicker tails that like to eat our nice little transplants. Tomatoes we trained onto one leader. They were indeterminate varieties. And then we suspended twine from the roof perlins the first year in order to train our tomatoes. The cucumbers were grown on welded wire mesh the first year. And then we switched that up the second season. And the peppers we strung them up using the Florida Weave system. Now an identical trial was set up adjacent to the high tunnel in a field under field conditions. Same cultivars, same exact setup so that we could look at what was going on inside the high tunnel versus the outside. And this is the setup that we had in 2017. We were utilizing these tomato hooks with twine already on them. And then we suspended that from galvanized aircraft cable that we were running horizontally on our perlins. And there you can see everything was kind of strung up that way. And a close-up of some of those materials these are the bottom right photo is the I think they're I believe they're called tama hooks. And you can order them from seed supply catalogs places that supply things for greenhouses and high tunnels. On the bottom left is the tomato clip. And this is what we used to attach the leaders the plants to our twine. And over on the top right excuse me top left photo we have just a little snapshot of what the irrigation system we used a ball valve here and just your regular drip tape. So I wanted to show those to you in case you had some questions on that. So for the actual trial setup our tomato trial we used a randomized complete block design we had four repetitions and we had nine cultivars. The planting area per block per rep is nine square feet. And we utilized transplants. At the Nessun Valley research site we had one plant per block. And at Absaraka we utilized two plants per block to collect our data from. The 2016 season got a late start due to the fact that we were both both locations were still finishing the construction of their high tunnels. And the 2017 trial at the Williston station viruses completely took out my tomato trial inside the high tunnel. And I'll talk a little bit about that later but that was pretty disappointing for me. But we learned some lessons here. So I have a snapshot of the cultivars that we utilize. This is just a cultivar comparison. We chose mostly all hybrids except for one this pink Berkeley tie dye is an open pollinated heirloom type tomato. The rest of them were F1 hybrids. And we did select a few that were said to be a high tunnel variety. Arbison was one of them. Cobra was another. This pink wonder was said to be good in greenhouse conditions and same with this Tomimuru moochu. And then we also chose a couple of industry standards if you will best boy which replaced better boy and new girl which replaced early girl. And this is the data snapshot of my 2016 data table from Nessan Valley. Now I haven't gone through all of the data from 2017 yet and I need to look at that in the next coming weeks here. But I'll talk about 2016 so you can see kind of what we had going on here. So Tomimuru moochu was our top yielder in terms of total yield. But if you look at new girl we actually had a pretty high marketability with new girl tomatoes. So I was kind of happy to see that. It was it was interesting to see how things ended up playing out here. Pink Berkeley tie dye definitely had the most unmarketable yields. And I'll show you a picture of what we were seeing with that one. heirloom tomatoes are treated completely different than your hybrid types. The skin is a lot more tender. I mean they're just a lot more meatier. They've got more they're juicier. They're just they're different. They need they have a different fertilizer requirement and different irrigation requirement. And this was this was evident in this trial. We were seeing some significance between the cultivars but not a whole lot. Okay so the photo on the left is Tomimuru moochu. The photo in the middle is trust and the photo on the right is new girl. So with Tomimuru moochu we were seeing a lot of this green shoulder and some sunscald. And I think a lot of that has to do with pollination and temperatures. When the temperatures are getting too high in the high tunnel we start to see some of that. We were seeing some splitting here and then a secondary infection would get in there. Anthracnose was very common for us. But this is what we wanted to see. We wanted to see tomatoes like this here on the right hand side. And on the on the bottom left here is pink Berkeley tie dye. And so you can see that they just they would split they would crack right open. And that has a lot to do with the irrigation and the fertilizer that we were putting on these guys. The photo in the middle is pink wonder. We were seeing a lot of radial cracking with that particular variety. And the photo on the left or excuse me the right is Arbison. So those were some nice looking tomatoes. This is what we were really wanting to see. So some issues that we had. The photo on the left we tested our tomatoes for viruses. We sent them into the plant diagnostic lab. And they came back positive for cucumber mosaic, tomato mosaic and tobacco mosaic. When I was first seeing symptoms in 2016, we were suspecting herbicide carryover because this site had been a switch grass trial for 10 years prior to us tilling it and plant and building this high tunnel and planting into it. So my first thought was herbicide injury due to some persistent herbicide in the soil. But in actuality, we were dealing with these viruses. So cucumber mosaic virus, the symptoms that we're seeing here on the left side of the screen, it's that filiformity deformed leaves, the shoestring like symptoms. And then in the middle this is this photo is showing you how it was expressing all the way across the plant. And the photo on the right, this was taken May 26, 2017. I planted my tomatoes. And then I would come back, excuse me, this is just a close up of that shoestring, the deformed leaves. But it came back on June 28, so almost a month later. And in the middle of the high tunnel, these rows right along in here, there's, I had to pull the plants completely out. The tomatoes were just, these were transplants. And in just a few weeks, they were already expressing these symptoms. You can see the tomatoes farther towards the back end of the high tunnel. They were all doing okay. I was just, it was just really frustrating for us to see that in there. Okay, so moving along to our bell pepper trial. Again, randomized complete block for repetitions, nine cultivars. Our planting area this time was six square feet per block per plant and we utilized transplants again. And then I wanted to point out the, this is what we did for our Florida Weave system. We had posts put in on either end of our trial and there was one along the middle and we took, we took bailing twine and you just weave in and out of these plants, every two plants or so, and you just go back and forth a couple of times. And that is how we staked up our peppers inside the high tunnel. So at Nessan, we had one plant per block again and we had two plants per block at the Absaraka. So we were collecting a lot of data over the past two years. And 2017, for me, was the year of the aphid. So we definitely had some issues with that. I'll show some issues with that. I'll show some pictures later, but the green peach aphid was, was really prevalent this year. And so this is a snapshot of our cult of our comparisons. Again, we chose the F1 hybrid varieties and the California Wonder is the open pollinated heirloom variety that we chose. The variety, I chose some of these based off their color. This islander produced a nice purple, purple fruit. And then we had two that were yellow. And the rest were green to red. So we could harvest them at green or wait until maturity for red. So yeah, there was the bell peppers are a lot more uniform as far as their shape goes. This is a snapshot of our data table. Again, it's 2016 and it's from Nessan Valley. And you can see that islander for us in Williston was the highest yielding and it produced the highest number of fruits. This particular variety continued to produce. And in an unofficial taste test by my colleagues here at the Research Center, islander had the best flavor. It was very sweet and it had kind of a more tender skin. So I was really impressed with that one. And then ace and king Arthur, those are two pretty, pretty decent varieties for production as well. Okay. So a couple of issues that I wanted to point out with our bell pepper trial. Again, we were seeing viruses. Obviously, we've got peppers and tomatoes, they're in the same family, they can carry the same diseases. The photo on the left is what I was seeing in 2016. The photo in the middle is what things looked like in 2017. I did send in for analysis. And these did not come back with the virus, but they were expressing some symptoms. The row in the middle had to be completely replanted. You can see that they just struggled throughout the entire season. The photo on the right was taken in late August. And this is what the plants are looking like when they are completely inundated with aphids. They were incredibly hard for us to control. We did use some agricultural use pesticides, some broad spectrum pesticides across the whole high tunnel. That didn't work. We switched over to neem oil. We even used, we even tried just washing the plants off with a stream of water. And this is what it looked like. These little buggers were just everywhere. I was looking for the photo that we had after we had rinsed off the plants, there was a puddle on this landscape fabric, and the puddle was just, it was green. There was so many aphids in there. We were starting to finally see some control after utilizing the horticultural oil. And after we had washed off the majority of the aphids, that seemed to kind of break their cycle for us. But the damage can, the damage was done for us. They were still producing, but this is some of the things that I was seeing. These deformed fruits, that's a pretty characteristic of a virus. This is what we wanted to see. So this is islander, the nice purple variety. Okay, so with that, I'll talk a little bit about the cucumbers here. It looks like we're still doing good on time. This is Roji Pratham. She is our agronomist's wife there from Nepal, and she helped me plant all of these trials this year. And here we are planting the cucumber trial. Again, randomized complete block, four reps, nine cultivars. We had approximately seven and a half square feet per block per rep. Now in the first year, we utilized seeds. We direct sowed our cucumber seeds, three seeds per hill, and then we terminated two, leaving behind the largest, the healthiest plant. And in the second year, we decided to seed two seeds per four inch pot, as you can see here on the ground. There's two plants growing in there. We transplanted them both together, and then we terminated one plant after establishment. And then again, we had to put coffee cans around in our 2017 season. And we used row covers to protect them from the cool temperatures. And they didn't really do much for us for about a month because of the cold temperatures. And spider mites were the bane of my existence on the cucumbers this year. So we'll talk about that as well. This is a snapshot of the cultivars that we chose. Again, they were all hybrid F1 hybrids, except for one, which was this diva open pollinated variety. We did have three cultivars that were picklers, Isnik, Harmony, and Excelsior. The rest of them, however, were slicers. And again, we looked at what they were suited for. And so this cat arena was touted to be a high tunnel or greenhouse variety. Socrates was considered a cool climate. Cucumber, Excelsior, a greenhouse pickler, Isnik, a high tunnel cucumber, and Corinto, an early producer. So we chose a vast variety just so we could look at things that way. And a snapshot of what we have here. I went ahead and ran this data based on our unmarketable percentage, because what I wanted to see was marketable fruit and total weights. And the number, and I ran my significance based off the number of harvested fruits. We had cucumbers coming out of our ears. So it was amazing how much fruit they produced. Isnik, again, I said that was a pickling variety. 97 was the total number. We harvested that one a lot. But as far as weight goes, Corinto was actually our top yielder in weight. And so that's kind of how the numbers ended up playing out. Marketability was pretty good. Cucumbers did really well for us in 2016. This is what I was seeing in 2017. So the photo on the left-hand side here, I have yet to discover what was happening here. I've contacted various people. We sent this in for lab testing. It did not come back with any disease. I've been told cucumber beetle damage. I've been told mechanical damage. There was something happening in the environment that was causing this early on in the season in 2017. We were seeing some fungal issues late in 2016. And we feel that we got a handle on that in 2017. But then along came the itsy-bitsy spider here. On the right-hand side is the two-spotted spider mite. And these things were all over the cucumbers. So early scouting was one of the lessons that we learned. Early scouting for diseases and insect problems will go a long way for you. A couple other things that we did have. This is thrip damage. When the thrips start to feed, they cause this puckering. We were able to take care of that with our broad spectrum insecticides that we were spraying early in the season. The spider mites came on board in the later part of the season. This is a photo of what anthracnose looks like. You end up with these angular-shaped lesions that eventually will the leaf tissue will eventually break down and you'll end up with these holes. And this was mitigated for us just by some broad spectrum fungicides. Some agricultural use fungicides at various timings. So we were timing a lot of our applications on a weekly basis. We did a lot of our spraying on Fridays knowing that no one would be in the high tunnel over the weekend. And that helped us take care of some of these issues. The insects were a lot more difficult to manage. And so on the left I mentioned those interns that I had. The left photo is my intern Jasmine and she was from the Ohio State. And we made a lot of pickles. We were making a batch of some spicy bread and butter. And the brine was a little bit a little bit too harsh on the sinuses. And so she decided to put a mask on. I thought that was kind of funny. So I took a picture of her. And the photo on the right is my son. He even got into the spirit of helping me make relish. He thought that was just great getting to grind up those cucumbers. So that was kind of a fun thing for us to do. And any of the produce that didn't get eaten by the folks here all got donated. I was trying to keep track of how many pounds we donated and I lost track. But it was a lot and we took a lot of it to the food banks here in Williston. And I know they they dropped off a lot of donations in the Fargo. Fargo the Great Plains food bank as well. So okay. So we'll switch gears. We'll talk just briefly about some weather things that I wanted to note that I wanted to share with you guys today. And then I think we'll open it up for some questions. So okay. So we utilized the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, NDON. And this is a photo of what the weather station looks like. It's located at Nessan Valley and it is called the Huffland Station. So if you went out to NDON and you wanted to look at what was happening out there, search for the Huffland Station and you'll be able to find out what's going on there. So I went back and looked up a monthly report for 2017 and I've highlighted a date there for you to take note of. The average first frost for Williston is September 19th. It's fairly early. So I wanted to point that date out to you. And you can see here the columns that I kind of just want to talk about are maximum temperatures and the minimum temperatures 48.8 degrees. Okay, that's great. But you can see here that on the 17th we had a dip down into the 30s and then after that a dip down into the 30s as well. Otherwise we were in the 40s and 50s. Not a big deal, but something that I wanted to note. Okay. Inside the high tunnel, we were utilizing these watchdog weather stations from Spectrum Technologies and they were collecting the data for us as a data logger. We were also capturing soil temperatures and relative humidity as well. So the photo down here at the bottom of the screen that weather station on the left hand side is what we were collecting our data from. That's just a radiation shield that white thing on there. So anyways, we had this set up at the middle of the high tunnel. And take a look at these low temperatures. Here on September 19th, we were at 44.8. And look, we're above, we're in the 40s and 50s that entire time. So I wanted to compare those two things. You can see our inside temperatures were still in the 70s and 80s in September. And then let's contrast that with October. Okay, so this is end on. This is our outside weather on October 4th, 5th, and 6th. That is our killing freeze for the season outside. So after that 31.7, we were down 29.7, 25. I mean, there's no recovering from that. So everything that was outside was dead. And so then we look at our inside temperatures. Okay, so our killing frost, if you want to call it a killing frost, or even a damaging frost occurred on October 13th. We had a 28.7 degree day. Okay, so that just shows you that we could overcome these seasonal fluctuations in these early season frosts. If we would have utilized some supplemental heat inside of our tunnel, I guarantee we would have been able to take this crop all the way to the end of October. Now, we didn't. And that's mostly because we have warm season crops growing in there and they weren't really producing for us anyways. We just wanted to see how long we could keep things alive. And so that's what we ended up doing here in our high tunnel research. So I think with that, just my brief summary, we were finding some significance within our cultivar trials. We were definitely seeing higher quality and quantity of produce as compared to the field conditions. And we definitely learned the importance of scouting for pests and insect problems. And the season extension was achieved for us due to the protection from the early fall frost. So that was kind of some exciting things that we were doing here with the NDSU high tunnel research. So with that, we'll just open it up to some questions. My chat box open here. And for this portion, if you want to say your question, just go ahead and unmute your microphone or type in the chat box. I guess I have a question for you, Kyla. Are there any consumer level high tunnels available if I wanted to have one? Like small scale? Yes. You know, the high tunnel that we have at our dry land station would be considered, I would consider that a backyard type. The one, it was purchased from FarmTech and it was 24 by 20. So not real big. And there are various home greenhouses that you can purchase. We've seen people doing a lot of different things with those. So nothing's really ringing a bell as far as consumer, but there are things out there that you can do for your backyard gardening. There are low tunnels. I can't remember what the term is for the type of low tunnel that you can purchase that's expandable, and then you can just kind of fold it back together when you're done. And that can keep things, that can extend your season, even just putting up something like that. Does, let's see, okay. You have a question. Okay. Does my research, does your research continue for the upcoming growing season? Yes. So this grant concludes this June and we'll be putting together our final report. We are still tabulating the data and I'll be running that in our statistical system here. But then Dr. Harleen Haderman-Valenti was able to obtain another grant that started in 2016 and they will be building a high tunnel on campus. So look for that. That'll be coming in the next few months here. They're going to be constructing a high tunnel on campus and then we'll be facilitating some research with cool season crops and utilizing heating, various heating mechanisms to keeping the soil warm. So that research will be conducted this spring and then we're also kind of looking at doing some cover cropping to address the soil health issues that come up with high tunnels. So somebody asked me, how do you, did you have noticeable damage from the sun with the plastic? Was it mostly wind? I'm not sure with that question. The sun damage, the sun scald, I think just had a lot to do with our pruning. If we were heavily pruning them we were seeing more sun scald. Are you talking the tomatoes? That question is from Todd. I'm not sure. Let's see, I was talking about the plastic. Oh, okay. So degrading the plastic, we didn't see a lot of damage on our plastic. This, the plastic that we utilized for our high tunnel was a six mil holly with an anti condensate coating and an infrared coating and it was double layered with the inflated, the inflated blower fan. So there was a airspace between the two layers of plastic and we really haven't had a lot of damage on ours with the wind at all, thankfully. So yeah, we haven't even had to replace anything. And I'm talking about the high tunnel at Nessan Valley. The high tunnel at our dryland station is a single layer poly and that I've had, I've already had some tearing on that one. So how did we fertilize? We utilized a type of siphon system where we were just able to fill a five gallon bucket full of fertilizer or concentrate and then we just hooked in this siphon type. I can't even think of what brand it was. And then we were able to just siphon in our fertilizer as we were running our irrigation. We did have a storage tank, a water storage tank outside the high tunnel that was full of water and then we utilized just a regular small scale pump to push the water through the drip tape. And we did a fertilizer schedule and I don't have that with me on hand. Was there a big difference from your outside garden to your hoop house? Yes, there was. We were seeing two and three times more produce coming out of the high tunnel than we saw coming from the field. So yes, we were seeing a big difference. Does anyone use crop rotation through the high tunnels? Fruit to crop, root crop, leaf crop? Yes, there's a lot of, there are a lot of things out there on crop rotation. And we, because this was kind of our maiden voyage, if you will, with high tunnel research specific for North Dakota, we really focused on one thing at a time. And I think in the future we will be looking at different cropping systems. A good resource to look at is Michigan State and they do have a lot of great information out there with their hoop house and looking at different croppings, different rotations. I haven't run across anything with fruit crop to a vegetable crop, but there are a lot of cool season to warm season. So you'll end up with your leaf, like your lettuces and spinach and things like that, transitioning into a warm season crop and then transition to say a cool season root crop or something like that. So how much earlier did the crops mature as opposed to the open field? Okay, that's a great question. So in the 2016 season, we, we were getting things into the high tunnel later because we were still finishing the construction, but we were harvesting cucumbers at the very end of June. And in the high tunnel, on the outside of the high tunnel in the field, we weren't getting cucumber crop until oh late July. So probably a good month. And same with the tomatoes, I would say the tomatoes were closer to our peak production was in August. Here in North Dakota, when you plant tomatoes outside, slicing variety. Okay, so it takes a lot longer to get that slicing tomato. Your cherry tomatoes are going to be a lot sooner. But yeah, so our, our typical harvesting was the end of June, mid to end of June, inside the high tunnel. And then we were able to carry that research, carry that harvest all the way to the end of September. So season was definitely long. Were you able to plant earlier in the high tunnel? Yeah, we were, we were able to get those cucumbers in there in April. So, and I think, and I anticipate this season, we will be getting our cool season crops planted in there in the next month or so. Do you think the aphid infestation was directly related to high tunnel confinement versus field where you have a more open environment? I think that the infestation, because we're surrounded by agricultural crops, it's impossible to say where the infestation came from. I assume your wind direction, we, you know, that can carry aphids from this, you know, the southern United States, they get blown up here through the jet stream and things like that. But the infestation, they, the population exploded because of the high tunnel environment. So this particular aphid can reproduce by something known as parthenogenesis. They basically give birth to live young and the majority of the young are females that are already pregnant. And so they literally are giving birth to these nymphs that go through their instars and they'll go through their instars based on the temperatures. So these aphids can go through their, the particular instars in like five days. And then you've got a reproducing female that's laying or giving birth to more live young. So it's kind of a vicious cycle when it comes to aphids. But the temperatures, the lack of predators, and the lack of, say, rain splash or anything like that that can wash the aphids off all contribute to aphid infestation and then it, it can change overnight how many aphids you have. And again, there were no natural predators in there. And that's something that has to be taken into consideration when you're spraying your insecticides. Obviously a broad spectrum insecticide is going to take care of everything, including your beneficial bugs. And so towards the end of the season, we were incorporating we, with the spider mites, we were actually incorporating biological predatory mites. But it's really important to, to find your thresholds first, be looking every single day for these things and then release your predator insects sooner. And so that's where we, we needed to do that sooner. I wasn't seeing as many aphids in the open field, although there were some, but the infestations were not as prolific because those aphids weren't reproducing as quickly. So I hope you come back and share the results. Yes, I'm hoping to publish, I'm hoping to publish these results. This is actually my master's thesis. And so I'll be putting that all together and then hopefully be able to share that with you if we can get this, get the results published. So yeah, how did we promote fertilization of the fruit? All of the cultivars that we chose were minus the open pollinated varieties. Specifically, the cucumbers were all parthenal carpic. And so they did not need fertilization. And the tomatoes, we, they were all, they're, they're what, buzz pollinated. We didn't really need to worry about our pollination issues. There were bees in there. And a lot of that had to do with the flowers that were planted in there. I did see quite a few bumblebees in there. So pollination wasn't really an issue for us with that. So, but yes, bees do come in, although I've read and I've heard various opinions on or not necessarily opinions, but the way that bees can get disoriented, the different honeybees versus bumblebees can get disoriented when they're flying around inside high tunnels. We didn't release any type of pollinator insects. I saw plenty of them in the, in the flower crops. So that helped. Why do many cucumber blossoms not produce? That's a good question. Sometimes I think the heat can contribute when your temperatures rise too frequently or too rapidly during fertilization and then you can't get the flower just aborts. And then I know we were seeing flower thrips as well on some of our cucumbers. So I think that can contribute to blossom that may not produce. I don't really have a great answer for that one. I don't have the fertilizer recommendations, the fertilizer rates for the tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. I'm sorry, I did not include that in today's research. There's so much information to share with you guys today. But if you'd like, I can probably find that information. There, the irrigation scientists down at the Nessin Valley Research was instrumental in helping me make sure everything got irrigated on a daily basis and fertilized. So my research contains the high tunnel research down at Nessin Valley, which is about 23 miles east of Williston. And then the entire dry land station, the landscaping, and I do have display gardens and small fruit research here. And so I can't be in two places at once. So I will check with our irrigation scientist Tyler and see if he can email me what he was fertilizing with. Let's see. You may have covered this, but were the slides of your high tunnels open on occasion for years? Yeah, so the high tunnel that we built, we purchased an internal thermostat system that was connected to mechanical sidewall vents. So they were set up on a thermostat, and so the side walls would roll up based on a temperature threshold. And we did that because we knew that we wouldn't be there 24-7 to maintain air temperatures in there. And so, yes, the sides of our high tunnel were open. The end walls on the two ends, we never removed anything. We had a door on the one end, and we had end wall vents up near the peak. And those would open as well on a temperature threshold. And that's how we utilized our air circulation was mostly just wind. In Northwest North Dakota, our climate is considered semi-arid. So believe it or not, we actually didn't have as much humidity inside of our high tunnel. And the circulation wasn't as big of an issue for us. On the eastern side of the state, it definitely was. And so I think having some sort of fan to move air is a good thing to look into, something that we might look into just to keep air circulating. But the roll-up sides were based on a thermostat, and they would open and close automatically. And it just depended on the temperature for how often they would roll up and down. Every once in a while, we would have to go out and manually close the roll-up sides, specifically if we had a storm coming through. And it was still really warm outside. So the temperature was saying to stay open, we would go and manually close that because if a storm blew through, we didn't want air getting up in there and causing damage. So good questions though. If anybody has any more follow-up questions, please email me or email Julie and she can forward on. And I definitely appreciate the questions and your time today. And hopefully, I shared some experiences that might save you all from what we ended up with, you know, making the mistakes for you guys. So I'd like to thank you, Kyla. This was really, really interesting. And thanks for the time you spent in pulling this together and sharing it with us. So thanks a lot. And for all of the those of you out there, please take the survey and join us again in coming weeks. Thanks a lot. Awesome. Thank you.