Posts Tagged ‘tarp’

Building a hoop house

Today we used a plan from groworganics.com to build a small hoop house, where we can start our tomatoes.

Check out the plans we used here:

http://intheloop.groworganic.com/2009/04/how-to-make-a-hoophouse-on-a-raised-bed/

It was up in about 2 hours and that includes patching together the 4 sides from scrap wood, salvaged from construction of our straw bale field shed.  We had 18 pieces of 2x6, each 27 inches long, sitting around from having trimmed them off the ends of our floor joists, so we bound them into patchword sides for a raised bed by using short sections of 2x4s to connect the 2x6 lengths, 4 per side.

What a great opportunity to use even more of our remarkably meager scrap from the straw bale project!  Drew was amazing at estimating materials, and our scrap pile is VERY tiny—and getting tinier.

Here is a set of pictures documenting the hoop house construction today.  We made just two changes to the original plan:  (1) we attached the hoop brackets inside, instead of outside, of the raised bed.  Hopefully this won’t impact our efforts to attach the tarp—which we’ll do 2 weeks from now.  We also plan to bolster the whole thing, and the tarp edges, by bracing the sides between damp straw bales.  (2) We added a horizontal strip of PVC to the front and back, as a way of anchoring the “door” portion of the tarp.

We’ll be tarping and planting next weekend.

Dan