Hoop House Construction - Part I

This is sooooo exciting and great fun to see the progress of this project. Since Mother Nature has gotten the best of us for the past couple of years, i.e. no or limited tomatoes, little or no peppers and no eggplant! This year we decided to try a couple of temporary hoop houses. We call these hoop houses because we won't be regulating the temperature other than to lift the sides if it should get too hot inside of them.



This picture is of our small garden. We are going to put the two temporary hoop houses here. This garden dries out first, so we are able to prepare the soil earlier. We tilled up last year's "residual" (technical term for weeds and dead veggies), then spread and tilled in 4 yds of Cedar Grove Compost.







Then we laid down 4 ft wide weed cloth from Gempler's. This will serve us well for the season, i.e. we won't need to weed around the base of the plastic pipe. Oh, I might mention, that the white thing on a pole stuck in the raised bed on the right ... it's one of our organic pest control methods. It's a net for capturing cabbage moths. Although we did get a lot of exercise, we're going to supplement netting with remay.

This is the spot for our 10 foot wide hoop house. It will be used for a variety of tomatoes. The tomatoes will be planted directly into the ground and there will be two 60 foot rows.



Three foot rebar posts are then pounded two feet into the ground. One foot of rebar is above ground.

A 20 foot plastic PVC pipe is then bent from one rebar post to another rebar 10 feet across from the first. These two end pvc pipes are 60 feet apart.

And, here we go! 16 - 20 foot PVC pipes forming the skeleton of our first hoop house. We still need to put the ropes across the top, the tie downs in and the plastic over the top. We'll also be laying weed cloth down inside the hoop house.

Nice job, Doug and Sara. Now if the wind will die down enough to put up the plastic, we'll be in great shape. More to come ... and you have a great day!