The Net-House:

This 8m x 12m net-house is one of my more recent farm projects that I have been working on. The Idea here was to create a space to grow your soft leaf fruits and veg all year round, the problem was that even though our climate allows for all year growth the African sun can be quite harsh on the softer plants, causing not only major water loss but also during a heat wave burn the plants beyond repair.

The Starting Point:

This net-house was constructed using nothing more than some 60% shade cloth, some wooden poles, second-hand metal beams, cement, a needle & thread, hammer &nail, wire and some good old fashioned elbow-grease.

I started off by measuring out the space I wanted to use for this project, then dug holes for the corner posts, and support posts on either side of the (soon to be) structure. For this I used some metal beams that I bought secondhand at a really good price from the owner of a demolished factory, he was kind enough to cut them in the required lengths and have them delivered for me :) These were then sunk into the holes and cemented in place.

The middle poles, as you can see on the picture was cut longer than the side poles- the reason for this was to elevate the roof of the net-house in the middle to prevent the accumulation of foliage mostly.

Then each plotted hole for the additional wooden support beams were dug, poles sunk and cemented in place.

Only after the cement had been cured and left to dry completely could we move on to the next step, and this was the netting. The rolls of netting are just under 3m wide this meant that all the strips had to be sown together - given the simple life I lead it goes without saying that this was all done by hand, once the netting was up and the edges were trimmed, the shade cloth was securely nailed to the wooden beams,this was to keep it sturdy and prevent tears should any strong winds rise, I also sewed in a wire strip at the bottom of the netting on ground level and nailed that in place to the support beans to ensure that the netting doesn't lift when there are winds and small critters like wild deer cant easily find their way in.

Once the structure was complete, we started manually working the land and making planting rows, this was then enriched by adding natural compost, manure and some home brewed black tea and left to set for about a week or so before planting.

My First Crop:

I decided to plant sweetcorn as my first crop in the net house, carefully selecting good quality heritage seeds to do this with, and at first things were looking great the plants were not suffering from major water loss which is a big thing in this area ~ especially given the fact that watering is still being done manually until I can afford to put in a simple irrigation system. The plants were also not being burnt to a point of stagnating growth or death by the harsh sun, and I was feeling QUITE OPTIMISTIC!

However insects such as cut worms still managed to find their way in, and seeing that I have closed the channels for the course of natural predation to take place, they became a huge problem soon enough. (See pictures below)

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A Small Victory!

After quite an intense War On Worms (which I will be elaborating on in a follow up post) I managed to save the most of the plants from complete destruction.

Breeze 1 / Worms 0

And as you can see in this picture the remainder of the sweetcorn plants are now strong and steady, and I am expecting a good crop yield from these flourishing plants!