Building Hoop Houses out of Electrical Conduit
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our hoop houses that we have over our raised beds here at Chiot’s Run. They show up in a lot of photos. They sure come in handy for covering with frost blankets, netting to keep insects/birds out, supporting peas, as well as for winter garden protection. The first year I overwintered some spinach I didn’t have these hoops over the garden. I simply bent some bamboo poles and floated a row cover over them. This did a fabulous job protecting my spinach crop throughout the winter (we live in a zone 5).
The next spring we decided to build more permanent and sturdier structures for overwintering crops. We didn’t have enough space for a big greenhouse or a big hoop house, so the next best thing was to make small hoop houses over each raised bed. I researched a little and found that a lot of people use irrigation tubing or PVC, which is plastic and pliable. You drive some stakes or rods into the soil leaving 8-12 inches sticking out of the soil or make a base with holes in it to insert the tubing into. I found these photos on Flicker to give you an idea of other options (thanks to oceandesetoiles for these two images)
We decided we’d rather use electrical conduit because of it’s rigidity, we get a lot of heavy wet snows here and didn’t think the tubing would hold up as well. This conduit is very inexpensive as well and we figured it would outlast the irrigation tubing as well. The conduit was $2.19 each length of pipe and we used 4 per raised bed (our beds are 4×10).
Now I’ll have to warn you that pipe bending is not the easiest thing in the world. Mr Chiots and I worked together and our hoops are fairly nice. Not perfect, but not too bad either. I’d recommend buying an extra piece of conduit for a practice piece. The first thing we did to help with even bending was to mark the conduit 21 inches in from each end and then in 2 inch increments in between these two marks.
We used a hand pipe bender and practiced on one or two pieces to learn how much force was needed for a small bend each 2 inch increment along the length of the pipe. We over bent the pipes a bit, so they did not look like a hoop when we were finished. Ours looked more like teardrops since we left the ends straight, then we stretched them back out a bit to put them over the beds.
I will once again warn that this isn’t the easiest thing to do to get these things nicely rounded (read through the comments on this post I wrote about it last year). Mr Chiots and I are adventurous and willing to try to do anything ourselves though, so we were not daunted by the task. We were also OK with less than perfect hoops. We joke that ours have character since they were made by local artisans.
You can now buy a special tool just for bending garden hoop houses from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They came out with it the year after we made ours. It’s a little pricey at $69, but if you want to make a lot of hoops or have someone to share the cost with it would be a worthwhile investment.
We attached the hoops to the raised beds with two pipe clamps, one up top and one at the bottom. They’re very sturdy and will last a long time. I do love these because they come in handy for so many things. We use them to hold up netting over the strawberries to keep the birds out. We throw row covers over them to keep the deer out of the peas. We also throw blankets over them to protect from late spring frosts.
I ordered some greenhouse plastic this week and I’m hoping to use them as mini greenhouses this winter. I’ll be using a floating row cover on short wickets inside these hoops (you can be sure I’ll blog about it this fall). They also have come in handy to steady myself if I lose my balance or when I’m reaching in to the middle of the bed.
What measures do you use in the garden for extending the season and protecting crops?
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Book Review: The Winter Harvest Handbook
I mentioned yesterday that I loved to read and that I was currently reading Eliot Coleman’s newest book The Winter Harvest Handbook. I’ve read his other books Four-Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower which are both great. When I read I keep a small notebook at hand to jot down info, quotes and other interested things. My notebook is organized into sections, one for each book, a section for plant ideas and a section for each month so I can jot down when I need to do specific things related to a time line.
While reading this book I found myself jotting down so many notes, I decided I’d better buy the book (so I did). Since the information in this book is seasonal and time specific, I knew it would be a worthy addition to my reference library. I’ll be referencing it often in my efforts to make the most of my garden throughout the long winters here in my zone 5 NE Ohio garden. I knew if I didn’t buy it I’d be constantly requesting it from the library trying to remember when to plant leeks or lettuce for a mid-winter harvest.
If you’re interesting in winter gardening at all, I’d highly recommend buying this book. Now is the time to start reading about winter gardening so you have a good understanding and can start planning for it. If I had spent a little more time last summer and fall I’d be harvesting a bounty of fresh spinach, leeks and other vegetables right now instead of waiting for my spring planted spinach and lettuce to mature enough to harvest. I’m really hoping to overwinter some carrots this year as well as some leeks.
This book is full of charts and graphs to help you understand what and when you need to plant specific crops for late fall, early and late winter as well as early and late spring harvests. Eliot does a great job explaining why we can grow food in our northern cold climates even though traditionally people don’t think you can. You just have to have an understanding of how the fewer daylight hours affect the maturation rate. The list of of specific cultivars they grow at the Four Season Farm that’s included in this book is a great resource and jumping off point for anyone interested in winter gardening. You can’t just plant any kind of lettuce in the winter garden.
While the book is written by a market gardener, and their techniques are done on a large scale, the ideas are easily translated to the small home garden. I enjoyed his previous winter gardening book (Four-Season Harvest), but it felt a bit more “out of reach” for me as a small grower without room for a greenhouse. In this book he goes into much greater detail about all the experiments they’ve done and what worked and what didn’t. It really makes is seem much more attainable for the small home gardening with things like those hoop houses I built over my raised beds were built with winter gardening in mind.
I really like that he recommends specific products, like lighter floating row cover instead of a heavier grade. Which crops they use soil blocks to start seeds for, when they start leek seeds and how and when they harvest different kinds of greens. I just ordered some more floating row cover and some greenhouse plastic for my hoop houses using his recommendations. You can be sure I’ll keep you posted on my efforts to harvest more from my garden in the winter months.
I’ll keep reading stacks of gardening books and let you know which ones are worthy of your time (an in depth feature that will be on my new blog – yep, blog redesign coming soon). Of course if you end up buying this book, buy through my amazon link above or in the sidebar, they give me a few cents and I certainly appreciate it (helps pay my hosting bills).
Have you ever thought about, or had experience with winter gardening? Any great tips or books you’d recommend?
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Books, Books, Books and more Books
I read a lot. I don’t buy books, or I’d be penniless, I get them from the library. If I love the book I often buy it so I can read it again and again. This is the stack I’m reading currently, with a few others scattered about the house in my various reading points.
This time of year I’m pretty busy, so I don’t get as many books read as I would like. I find myself reading during any spare bit of time I can find; over breakfast, lunch and dinner, at night before going to sleep, for an afternoon break, in the evening. I still won’t get all the books read that I want to read, but that’s OK.
I generally have a notebook handy while reading so I can jot down quotes, ideas, plant recommendations, etc. Right now the book I’m thoroughly enjoying is The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses. More about it specifically tomorrow.
Do you like to read? Do you use your local library?
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Starting Hollyhock Seeds
Being a lover on cottage garden, I really like hollyhocks. I have double ones in the garden in pink and in yellow and I have some mini ones as well. When I saw seeds for ‘The Watchman’ I thought they would be lovely. Last year I tried to start the seeds without any luck, I seeded a whole flat and not a one germinated. Hollyhock seeds need light to germinate, which makes it tough sometimes because they can get blown or washed away if you have the flats outside (which is probably what happened to mine).
I thought that if I tried to start them like other flat seeds that need light, like amaryllis and tulips, I might have better luck. I floated them in warm water in a small ramekin in my kitchen window a few days ago. I noticed yesterday that a few of them were germinating already! When most of them germinate I’ll transfer them to flats with some soil. Looks like next year I’ll have some dark hollyhocks blooming in my cottage garden!
Do you have any interesting seed starting techniques you’ve had luck with?
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A Little TLC
This sewing machine belonged to my great grandmother. It was passed down to my mom and she gave it to me. It’s been a little mistreated over the years beginning with my great grandma. As it seems so many people did, she used it as a plant stand, so it has the telltale signs with ringed water stains on the top. I’ve been wanting to clean it up and give it a coat of protective oil for a while, I just haven’t had the time.
On Sunday evening I took it outside, cleaned it up, and gave it a protective coat of linseed oil. The nice thing about linseed oil is that you can use it on everything, even the metal parts. It shines now, not quite as it did in it’s heyday but as I always say, “It’s not perfect but it has character!”.
I do love this piece of furniture, not just because it’s a sewing machine and I love to sew, but because it’s a piece of family history. It still has bits and pieces in the drawers that were my great grandma’s; needles, scrap fabric, wooden thread spools, and used zippers. All those things we don’t really save to reuse now, but they did then.
Now that it’s all cleaned up it will go in my living room. I won’t put plants on it unless they have a protective dish or cork under them.
Do you have a treasured piece of furniture with family history?
