Low-cost, Versatile Hoop Houses

Image Gallery George DeVault

After nearly 20 years of market gardening, we often hear the question, "What would you do differently?"

Simple: Build more — and bigger — hoophouses a whole lot sooner, like from the beginning.

Whether you're a market gardener wanting to extend your season or a family looking to grow more of your own food year-round, a hoophouse is the answer. For as little as a few hundred dollars, a backyard hoophouse can make it seem like you moved your garden hundreds of miles to the south. You can count on four to six weeks of extra production in spring and fall. By adding an inner layer of cover inside a hoop and picking cold-hardy varieties, you can grow right through winter — even in the coldest climates.

What is a hoophouse? Nothing fancy or even expensive, unless you like to make things that way. A hoophouse is just what the name suggests, a series of large hoops or bows — made of metal, plastic pipe or even wood — covered with a layer of heavy greenhouse plastic. The skin is stretched tight and fastened to baseboards with strips of wood, metal, wire or even used irrigation tape and staples. You can build one for a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars.

While visiting market gardens from British Columbia to Russia, I have seen serviceable hoophouses made from plastic water pipe and rebar, saplings and rusted bedsprings, fiberglass rods, electrical conduit, strips of old firehose, scraps of plastic ironed together between sheets of newspaper (you can still read the print on the plastic) and old car tires.

Unlike a traditional greenhouse, a hoophouse usually has no heater or ventilation fan. It is heated by the sun and cooled by the wind, providing that you remember to open the vents in the morning and close them in the afternoon. (For growing through winter in cold climates, adding a small heater lets really determined growers laugh at the cold.)

Building a hoophouse is not rocket science. Dollar for dollar and square foot for square foot, a hoop is without question the most forgiving, productive and profitable structure you can own. That's why people who build one, including me, often keep right on building. It's not uncommon to see three, four or more hoophouses on one farmstead.

A hoophouse is the perfect do-it-yourself project. There are only two cardinal rules to remember:

1. Make sure your corners are square. The ground doesn't even have to be perfectly flat. The west end of our first hoop visibly slopes downhill, which aids drainage.