Category: Spinach

The weather has been sunny for the past few days, thank God, and I have been able to finish the hoop house.  In this post I describe the first day of construction.

My hoop house is small and isn’t a permanent structure, but it should protect my vegetables from rain, wind, cold, and even heat.  It is also something you can make in your own garden with easily available materials from a home center or online.

Here is a photo of the finished hoop house, with Phoenix kitten looking on.  He hopes I make a lovely winter habitat to attract lizards and other fun things he can catch.  I draped the plastic over the entire structure, with the help of my children.  I could have done it alone, if I had sandbags ready to weight down the plastic.  The day I completed this project was breezy, which made things interesting but manageable.

At the ends of the structure are sandbags.  The professionals with large tunnels pull the plastic tight and tie it to a stake, but the sandbags are sufficient for my needs. 

You can see the conduit inserted on top of the rebar.  I tied rope to the rebar and zig-zagged it over the top of the hoop house to hold down the plastic.  I will pull up the plastic, and then pull the rope tight to hold it up for ventilation or to get inside to work.

I cannot stand up in the structure; it is only about 4 feet tall at the apex.  I also got some clips that fit on the conduit to help hold it up and to hold it in place across the top.

To put the rope on top, I had to just play with it to figure out how it worked.  Here’s what I discovered:  I tied the rope to the rebar, not to the conduit, because then the rope will slip up with the conduit when it moves.  I tossed it diagonally across the hoop house and fished it out of the mud on the other side, and I wrapped it around the rebar on that side.

I continued this process down the hoop house with one rope (I needed one about 60 feet long, maybe a bit less, to go the length of my 35 foot long hoophouse).  Then, with another rope, also about 60 feet long, I started on the other side of the first hoop and zig-zagged my way down the hoop house.  My hoop house is 35 feet long.  If you double the length of the hoop house, which would be 70 feet, and then double that for the two ropes, you will probably have enough rope.

At the opposite end from where I began, I ended up with two ropes.  I can pull them tight to hold up the plastic when I raise it to ventilate the hoophouse, and I can relax it to let down the plastic.  The plastic-moving process isn’t as simple as it sounds: I will have to go hoop by hoop to raise and to secure the plastic. 

I am keeping the memory of this beautiful spinach, harvested from my cold frame, in my mind as I try to figure out how to construct and to manage all of this.  I hope to have an entire hoop house of this in a few months.

To see my first day of hoop house construction, in which I put up the conduit hoops, go here.