Two Feet in the Dirt

After a month of thinking about and working on plowing the fields, our focus shifted completely over the last week as we embarked on the major project of setting up our hoop house. Hoop houses are basically unheated greenhouses. The clear plastic that covers the frame allows in light and then helps traps the heat inside, allowing crops to be grown much earlier and later in the season and even over the entire winter. 

By hoop house standards, it’s a pretty modest structure at 20 feet wide, 48 feet long, and 12 feet high. But by my standards, it seems enormous! I had seen more or less the exact hoop house I wanted on a friend’s farm earlier this year. It was 48 feet long, but only 16 wide and 8 tall. The height in particular was what appealed to me. 8 feet feels manageable. Even I could easily reach the top standing on a ladder. However, I wanted our’s to be slightly wider and failed to account for some basic geometry (which, granted, I haven’t had much use for since high school!), which meant that with the added 4 feet in width came an additional 4 feet in height. This took it from the manageable 8 feet height to 12 feet, which basically feels huge. 

Of course, in the long run, this will have positive pay off. Bigger structures have better heat-holding potential, meaning a longer growing season. Additionally, our friends’ main concern with their eight-foot structure was an inability to work standing up along the sides as the rafters approached the ground at an angle. With the 12 foot height in our hoop house, the rafter comes out of the ground basically straight, so even 6-foot-two Mike can stand in all parts of the hoop house, making our use of the space much easier and more efficient. 

Given the increased height, thank goodness my dad was able to come up on two consecutive weekends to help us. Our goal is to have all of the underlying metal and wood structure put up by the end of this weekend. We will wait to cover it in plastic until later in the winter. We don’t plan to start growing in it until then and, as hoop houses can collapse under heavy snowfall, putting the plastic on later will keep us from worrying about that for much of the winter.