House of Hoops

So we decided to try and winter some plants this season.  We are planning on taking some cuttings from a couple of our tomatoes and bringing them inside so that they would be ready as soon as spring comes.  Also, we are trying out a hoop house on half of our garden to see if we can keep those plants alive throughout the winter as well.  We were planning on building it this coming weekend but the weather over here took a turn for the worst today.  Today started out nice but this afternoon brought in the north winds and a cold front with it.   So our plans were pushed up and I started work on the hoop house as soon as I got off work.  I spent a half an hour at Lowes collecting all the bits that I thought we would need to build it.  This is what I got on that trip (see if you can spot what’s wrong with this list) :12 sticks of 1 inch thick and 10 feet long thin walled PVC, 2 ½ inch 10 foot long pvc sticks, 2 10 foot 1 by 2’s,  4 cross connectors ¾ inch thick, 2 tee connectors ¾ inch thick, 50 feet of rope, 12 inch stakes, some screws, and 2 10 foot by 25 foot plastic sheets.  As you can see I purchased 1 inch pvc and ¾ inch connectors, so I had to go back and switch out the connectors for the 1 inches ones, but was okay because I had forgotten to get some poly pipe to pack clamps out of so I would have had to go back anyway.  So the actual construction went like this, I cut the ½ pvc down to 2 foot lengths and used them as stakes to attach the 1 inch pvc to, and then I screwed the two overlapping pvc’s into the inside of our raised bed.   I then began to attach the connectors to the 1 inch pvc pipes, only to find out that there was too much pressure on the joints and they kept popping off (which was kind of scary).  So I took the whole thing down and decided to screw all the connections to the 1 inch pvc, which you can see here.

 This worked out pretty good at first, I got the first side on pretty easily, and it wasn’t until I started on the other side that things went wrong, again.

 

As I bent them into an arch I broke three of the pipes and ended up having to pull the whole thing down.  It was about then that Keturah came home from work, to see pvc pipe waving at her from the backyard.  Since she was home I put her to work, we pulled the whole thing down again and flipped the broken pipe around and screwed them in again.  This time we only broke one pipe and a tee fitting, so we decided to make the hoop house a little smaller than originally planned, which worked out because it ended up being 10 feet long which is how wide the plastic sheeting was.  Skip ahead a little and we have put the plastic sheeting over the hoops (with a little trouble and one or two holes in it), and we screwed down the strips of wood on each side where the plastic was able to be folded over a couple of times.  

We did this as the temperature was dropping and the wind was picking up quite a bit, so it wasn’t that much fun…  After we got the sheeting on and screwed down we made some clips out the poly pipe and snapped them on the outer hoops, they worked surprisingly well.

 

 And finally we attached some rope to the top point of each side so that we could anchor it down for the night, by this time it was quite cold and we were both hungry and slightly irritated.

So I will work on this a little more tomorrow, I plant to put the end walls on and add a door on the south side.  I will post some more pictures (if it is still standing tomorrow morning that is) when we get this thing finish, which should be tomorrow because tomorrow night it gets down below freezing and if we don’t finish it all our plants will die off.  I’m now off to eat some dinner and post this blog.