How to build a cheap and easy Hoop House
Tips about how to build a cheap and easy Hoop House for your monster 10lbs plants! Way to construct this little hoop greenhouse is incredibly simple and easy!
And for me, which is most important, it’s cheap. All you do is you’ve got this three-quarter inch schedule 40, PVC pipe.
- You get 20 feet (6.1 m) of it and make a hoop out of it,
- And you just drive in this rebar and set it right down,
- Drive the rebar into the ground and set it in,
- Set PVC pipe on top of it, and make a hoop out of it.
- Do it again and again and again until you get to the end, however long you want it, and put them in 10 foot or eight foot sections because that’s real easy to deal with here in America.
- And then put a fence post in the middle, well more or less,
- With a little bit of tape tie up on one of these purlins or a top member, which is also three-quarter inch, schedule 40, PVC. And you run it the length of the greenhouse.
- Then just take couplings and couple it together wherever you want.
- And, shazam, you’ve got a greenhouse, a freestanding greenhouse!
It takes just a couple of hours to set something like this up. So the main thing though, you got to remember when you set it up, this thing has to be square. Everything has to be square. Make it a perfect rectangle, because if not, it’ll turn into kind of like this parallelogram. And then you’ll have this slant right here and nothing will really line up and it’ll be kind of pain. And I don’t know, it’s just not as strong of a structure, and it’s not good. So make sure it’s all lined up. That’s very, very important. And there’re several ways to do that. You can get these little lasers. I tried to buy on the other day, just didn’t have it at the store. But you get a little laser and it makes all the points, and it’s perfect. It’s so simple.
And then the next thing that you did, well before you did that actually, is you put this weed barrier down. And this weed barrier is great because it’s permeable. It lets the water through, but it doesn’t let the weeds come up. So that keeps everything nice and clean. And when something falls on the floor, you can see what it is. And, I mean, all there is here is a little bit of straw. This isn’t going to cause any damage. And then after that, built everything right on top of it. You can put these 200 gallon (0.76 m³) smart pots in here, and filled them with all kinds of stuff. We got a list right here on the side of the screen, because I’ll tell you, it’s just too much stuff for me to say.
But the important thing about the soil though is, so put a complete mix in here, and afterwards you’ve only given two handfuls of bat guano fertilizer to each plant. So all the elements were in there ahead of time. Then you can put a two to three foot seedling out here. That’s a seedling, not a clone, because a seedling is 25% stronger than your average clone, right? Okay. So put that seedling out here. But the thing is with a seedling, you had all these problems and stuff. And when the little plants were this big in April, about this tall, 8, 10 inches (25.4 cm) tall, well you were in the greenhouse right next door. And what happened was it snowed. So when it snowed, the only warm spot that had anything to eat was inside. So you had this, two or three little coveys of quail that hang around the house all year and everybody likes and stuff.
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Well you went in seeking shelter from the storm, right? And then you find this banquet. So the next morning the little guys take off because it’s a sunny day. You go in there and all these things are just emasculated. Really hot and heavy. But it’s the only seedlings you’ve got. So you leave them. And what happens? Well this is the result right here. So normally I’m not a big advocate of pruning, but I would have to say, when the quail get to them, it really works. These things are just incredibly strong. Now I don’t know if it made a huge difference as far as yield or not. But one of the things that really happens when you’re growing outside like this, is you can get just too darn big and the buds get too big for the branches. And normally that’s not a problem in doors because you just stake them up. But with a 10 pound (4.54 kg) plant, it’s really difficult to do that.
But what to do? When to put the net on? You can put it on real early on, but you got to watch it because you’ll start pulling and stuff. So it’s better to let these buds flop around just a little bit and then put the net on. So when you put it on, you throw it up over there and then take a stick with a little hook on it. A long bamboo pole for example, is what you use. And then you can take the netting and move it around where you want. And that keeps the buds from all flopping over when it gets windy and stuff. It’s really important.
So you can see this greenhouse has several different phases. First, you had a greenhouse with small seedlings in it, three feet high, two to three feet high. And once you outgrew the greenhouse, you put the netting on here so it would spread the branches, and you also spread the branches so it grew up and got more sun and put more light inside the plant. And then it just got too big for everything, so you had to net it again. That’s one of the problems when you grow these double-digit plants.
