High Tunnel Construction Part 2

Snapped a few pictures of the finished hoop house when I got home from work last evening.
Danielle purchased the 6 mil plastic in a roll 100 ft long and 40 ft wide. The plastic is held in place along the sides by simply burying it in a shallow trench. We cut 24 ft of the plastic so that we had 2 ft on each side to bury in the ground.
The ends are framed out with 2 x 4s with a 4 ft wide door on one end and a window at the other.
We need the window so that we can get cross ventilation on warm days so that we don't bake the plants. You can see some of the seedlings in the picture above.

T-posts are driven into the ground and attached to the end frames to add support. It is not really clear but we also strung all the hoops together with rope to tie the entire structure together. Probably the most difficult part was figuring out how to attach the plastic at the ends. We ended up just stapling it in place, which was easy enough, but I had wanted to avoid it so that we could more easily remove and reuse the plastic. Well we see how it holds up and we may end up leaving this in place all year since we are expanding our market garden, thanks to all the rooting the pigs are doing -- but that is another post. As far as holding up to the weather the hoop house so far has proven up to the task. It was something of a trial by fire, since the day after we finished it we had a nasty wind storm with 50 mph wind gusts followed by 5-6 inches of snow. Besides having to knock the accumulated snow off the top of the tunnel all was well.

I need to put a remote thermometer in the hoop house to get an idea of how well it is doing at insulating the plants. As you can see in the pictures from inside the tunnel it has already started to create its own weather system thanks to water vapor condensation.