US: Snow and wind bring down greenhouses
The wholesale-only farm lost 15,000 square feet of greenhouse space — about one quarter of total growing area in 15 greenhouses — that’s typically used for geraniums and bedding plants. Fortunately, they were empty at the time of the Feb. 8 blizzard, but there are plans to cut back on bedding plants this coming season because of limited space.
“It’s a major setback,” said Wojciechowski. “The wind sort of came down like a downdraft and flattened one and tried to flatten the other two. They could have handled the snow easily had it not been so windy, and they could have handled the wind if it hadn’t been so snowy.”
Wojciechowski, who’s rebuilding the 35-foot-wide, plastic covered structures with a used frame from a neighbor and materials from a greenhouse supplier in Connecticut, said he’s never experienced anything quite like this in 30 years.
Montague farmer Ryan Voiland said he was lucky that his large greenhouses were undamaged, but he did lose two smaller “caterpillar tunnels” that are about 200 feet long and 8 feet tall, with spinach and kale crops inside.
“We knew the caterpillar tunnels are sort of vulnerable during snowstorms,” said Voiland, who took turns with his wife, Sarah, sweeping snow off during the night. All looked OK when he swept at 11 p.m., but by the time she went back out at 3 a.m., they were about 90 percent collapsed.
He kept some of Red Fire Farm’s larger greenhouses protected by turning up the heat to 75 or 80 degrees so that the snow would melt off.
“Overall we feel very lucky,” he said, since the loss with the mangled frames totaled about $2,000, compared to $30,000 or $40,000 had it been the undamaged 4,000-square-foot greenhouses.
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