How to Build a Hoop House
Welcome to our Hoop House tutorial!
About Hoop Houses:
Hoop Houses are a variation of a greenhouse that allows you to grow in-ground. They are fairly easy and inexpensive to build; this one was constructed for less than $500. Hoop Houses can be used to extend your growing season if you live in northern climates. We use ours to get early starts on our vegetable plantings. Additionally, depending on the construction the plastic can be removed in the summer and replaced with either shade cloth or insect cloth depending on your needs; as this one has a fence panel construction the cover could be removed and the structure used for vining vegetables like tomatoes and beans during summer months.
Construction of our Hoop House:
Hoop houses can be built using a variety of materials. Most commonly they use PVC piping to get their arch; similar to how a camping tent achieves its shape. We chose to make our Hoop House using the cattle fence panel method; it is very easy to put together and results in a sturdy non-permanent structure.
Our Hoop House measures 16x8’. We started with two 8’x8” and two 16’ x8” boards to form a rectangular garden bed. The more level the better but these structures do not have to be perfectly level to work. We braced the boards of the bed with rebar to help support the weight of the soil against the garden bed. You can make your bed any size you like. Boards tend to come in 8-foot lengths, so we designed around those measurements for ease of construction. When using cattle panels it isn’t advisable to go wider than 8 feet or the hoop house won’t be tall enough to easily walk under.
Next, we took 55” x 16’ cattle panels and bent them over the box frame. They are being held in place by pressure against the box frame and zip ties. We constructed a rough door frame at one end and a window frame at the other out of found materials left over from other projects. We then zip tied the frames to the wire hoops at the top. We added pipe insulation on the ends of the hoop house so the plastic cover wouldn’t rip when rubbing against the edges.
The hoop house is covered in 6 mil greenhouse plastic; this can be ordered online in any size you want. The plastic you see here cost $50 and should have a life expectancy of 3-4 years. Once we covered the hoop house we framed the edges of the plastic on the door and window frames. Then we added a homemade door and a window (again, made out of scrap wood and plastic). Add some hinges and voila! Done.
After we got done congratulating ourselves, we realized we hadn’t accounted for how we were going to raise the sides if the interior got too hot – and it does get VERY warm inside! So, we taped along the front and back bottom edges with heavy duty duct tape to create a seam we could cut into. We fashioned a pocket along the long bottom edges to hold two 16’x4” boards; these boards fit neatly against the boards of the bed and can be held shut by hooks for fall and winter months; in the summer these sides now can be rolled up and the boards fitted into hooks to stay up. If I were to try this process again, I think I would finish off the front and back separately and simply make the plastic lining fully removable for the summer. That way once our seedlings were in the ground of the main garden we could utilize the frame for vining plants.
Lastly, we realized that we needed more room for seedlings, so we took some old wire shelving panels we had in the garage and installed using zip ties and paracord. This effectively doubled our growing space and they are easy to remove once we are done.
This was a very fun project, and one I’d love to repeat at home. A quick search on Google using the keywords “how to construct a hoop house” or “how to construct a cattle panel hoop house” will yield a wealth of videos on how people problem solved their own versions of hoop houses. I’m including links to some of my favorite tutorials here:
https://survivaljack.com/2021/02/draft-versatile-cattle-panel-hoop-houses/ - Great overview on a Hoop House project by SurvivalJack
https://youtu.be/tIh8gZ4OWKg - Discussion on Hoop Houses and snow loads by EdibleAcres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DKlXs8iov0 - Step by step video tutorial by TexasPrepper2
Lastly, Homesteading Family has several videos on the subject, these two being most relevant and my personal source of inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilosaVqiSlc&t=1033s - Bean tunnel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO9j9Tow_oQ&t=33s - Extension of the bean tunnel video to show hot they turned it into a hoop house
That’s it for our tutorial! Let us know if you have any questions in the comments and we will try to answer them as best as we are able. Good luck on your garden adventures!
