This year we built a portable hoop house on Deberosa for tomatoes and basil. It was fairly successful but as you can see from the storm post, it didn’t survive an extremely bad wind. I think it would have survived it the rain did not make the ground so soft that the rebar simply pulled out of the mud. Oh well, we’ll rebuild for next year – it will just be a little shorter and perhaps oriented lengthwise to the prevailing wind. I had moved 50 Buff orpington pullets into the structure to clean up and fertilize over the winter and they managed to do quite a good job until the storm hit – now they are in the hen house.
Here is a link to the design of this structure at the Washington State University web site:
http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/eb1825/eb1825.html
Carol Miles does agriculture testing and research at WSU and Pat Labine has her own 40 acre farm near Olympia where she raises pasture poultry, pigs, cattle, and sheep for the organic markets.
The hoop house is easy to build. We put a bit of extra effort into the end sections, and I had a door from a yard sale find for the entry. It’s about 6 ft tall in the center and 10 ft wide. We used the gray electrical conduit instead of PVC because it stands up to the sun better and doesn’t need the painting that is in the instructions. I like that the sides slide up between the twine and the pipes and then with a twist tie around the pipe you can keep it in place for ventilation on hot days. It does get hot in the hoop house! It was a jungle by the end of the season, mainly because I planted things a bit too close – one lesson learned!
Fantastic website, I will visit once again