Dear readers whose existence is dubious, I am happy to say that there are now four hoop houses with plastic on them. To be honest though, the fourth one is still in progress. That's what we helped with this morning. My primary job was drilling these little self-tapping screws as close to the bottom of the hoops as I could get so that we could wind twine around them. It also was to help relieve the pressure of the poles.

I found this fascinating. The hoops are hollow metal, and they go pretty deep into the ground (an incredible amount of man hours went into pounding them into the ground.) And there's water in the ground that starts to rise up into the pipes. When it freezes, the water wants to expand, and the pressure gets more intense (also I think the metal constricts a little bit.) So as soon as I make a hole, a stream of water bursts out and I have to wait for it to stop before screwing it in all the way.

Earlier this year, some of the metal got warped and we think it was because the frozen water expanding pushed the pipes partially up out of the ground, which bent the wiggle wire that was connecting them. Moral of the story: if you're sticking a hollow metal pipe deep into the ground and you want it to stay uniform in height relative to another metal pole, drill holes into it to help release any water pressure that might build up inside it.