Post in Local Food Matters-Comunity Garden Update

Jul 22 20:30 UTC

Howdy all,

For anyone that is interested:
Here's some info on building hoop houses and other cold season extenders.

New Mexico State University web site:
www.cahe.*nmsu*.edu/pubs/_circulars/CR-606.pdf

Also a great resource for building cold frames/hoop houses and growing cold
season crops is the book Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman.
I can loan the book if anyone wants to borrow it.

Also keep in mind if you build with PVC pipe do not use greenhouse grade
plastic.  Instead use contractors grade plastic, like from Home Depot.  The
reason being is that the higher grade greenhouse plastic reacts with the PVC
causing a chemical reaction and degradation which means your much more
expensive, 3 year plastic, will be only good for one year.
Also, I think that galvanized conduit is a much better choice for the long
term and the health of the environment than PVC. Neither is perfect by any
means....but PVC leaching into a vegetable garden cannot be a good thing.

Any way, everyone has a different way of approaching these designs and
constructions and I believe that you too can adapt a design to fit your own
needs.  Just try it out and I guarantee you will succeed.  One word of
advice: anchor your structures to the ground somehow....we used a couple
methods and the best we found was using a couple ropes to criss-cross the
structure with stakes into the ground.

Good luck
jenn hart-mann

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Julie Olague <CommonScentsNews@yahoo.com>
wrote: