Building Hoop Houses

Hoop houses, low tunnels, or caterpillars… whatever you call them, these things are pretty awesome. Why choose hoop houses over a greenhouse? Cost. Hoop houses are a fraction of the cost of a greenhouse per square foot. Greenhouses are nice because you build just one and then you get to walk around inside rather than in a monsoon like we did this week. Greenhouses are also taller. But hoop houses do everything a greenhouses does.

Because we are building so many beds, we bought our materials in bulk which saved us approximately 30-40%. It cost us about $100 per bed, and each bed is 250 square feet, putting us at about $2.50 per square foot. When pricing out greenhouses we estimated double that, which is why we went with the hoop houses.

Each bed is 5 feet wide and 50 feet long, with pathways in-between at 1.5 feet. Our pathways are a little narrow and I think we will be widening them a bit on some of the future beds. The wood is not there to hold the dirt in, although it helps a little. We are sitting directly on bedrock, so the PVC pipes can’t go right into the ground. What you could do is have 10’ pipes going into the dirt at least 6 inches, but we cut down the pipes to 9’. This is 1” PVC, and we cut small lengths of 2” PVC and attached it to the wood with steel plumbing strap, and the 1” pipe sits in the 2” pipe securely without fastening it further.

The wood is staked into the ground with big wooden stakes that we hammered in with a mallet, which keeps the wood from exploding outward from the pressure of the PVC.

The beds are filled with soil much higher than the wood, and then we cover it with 6-mil poly. The poly was set up in a windstorm with 40 mph winds, and held down with sandbags filled with the rocks that were sifted out of the soil. So far this has been very secure. It’s a bit muddy in there because we haven’t put in the bark mulch yet, but that will control weeds and ugly mud.

We are planting leeks and brussels sprouts in these two beds February 1st.