Low-cost, Versatile Hoop Houses

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For ventilation, Frase built "tunnel toggles," hinged pieces of wood that spread the double plastic pipe bows every 16 feet, where hoop sections are bolted together. In cold weather, Frase seals the of his hoops with plywood walls framed with 2x4s. Each wall has a small entrance door.

At our place, because the nearest hoop is only 75 feet from the back door of our house, we fancied the ends up a bit with T-111 plywood painted barn red with white trim and a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign. You can also cover the ends with clear greenhouse plastic, insulation board or polycarbonate greenhouse paneling.

Frase fastens his bows and plastic to 3x3-inch white oak rails. To anchor his hoops to the ground, he drills through the rails at about a 30-degree outward angle. He then pounds 2-foot-long pieces of rebar through the wood into the ground, leaving enough rebar sticking out to serve as a handle.

But is building and managing a hoop worth all of the effort and expense? Agricultural economists would have us consider 25 to 30 "variable costs" and "fixed costs" in answering that question for monocrops of bell peppers, tomatoes, new potatoes or cucumbers, most often sold at low wholesale prices. The list includes everything from "interest on operating capital" and "construction labor" to "ventilation" and "monitoring labor."

That seems a little like charging yourself for breathing or flossing your teeth. At our place, the production and marketing systems are a lot more sophisticated: We never fill a hoop with just one crop, and we sell everything at good retail prices.

On the bookkeeping side, we don't charge ourselves for the few minutes it takes each day to open and close the doors and roll-upsides. The hoop is in our back yard. We have to pay taxes on the land, control weeds and maintain equipment, whether we grow anything or not. We paid cash for the hoop. It more than paid for itself the first season. The hoop doesn't owe us a thing, yet the frame has a projected life of at least 20 years.

Our smallest hoop is 14 feet wide and 96 feet long. It covers 1,344 square feet — just 1/32 of an acre. Subtract 192 square feet for 2-foot-wide walkways running the whole length of the house. That leaves 1,152 square feet of usable space — a fraction of an acre.

That hoop produces from early March through Thanksgiving or even Christmas, depending on the weather. We usually have two early crops of lettuce and other cold-hardy greens. (The first crop is overwintered under small hoops and fabric row cover.) Next come heirloom tomatoes and other heat-loving summer crops like peppers, Oriental cucumbers and eggplant. In fall, we switch back to lettuce, carrots and other cool-season crops.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print