We get questions, every season, about the hoops we have on our raised beds. So, we’ll go through them since we have some good ideas and methods around it.
The hoops themselves are made from 1/2 inch PVC, which is super bendable and makes for great hoops. Instead of attaching these directly to the beds, we installed some smaller pieces of 1 inch PVC to the beds themselves. These small PVC pieces are attached to the beds with conduit clamps. This allows us to slide in the hoops, which makes them movable and removable with ease.
All of our beds are configured with these “hoop receivers.” What this allows us to do is move the hoops to any of our beds, meaning we can handle crop rotations with ease. We primarily have two sets of hoops, a set for our four foot beds and our two foot beds. We generally prefer not having hoops on the bed if they aren’t needed as they can get in the way of various work like planting and weeding.
You might think these are for frost cloth purposes, but that’s actually only a secondary (and rarely used) thing we do. Our primary use of the hoops is to install insect netting to protect our allium crops from the onion fly. This is a really nasty pest that can decimate your entire allium crop in a single season. And yes, they are alive and well even where it gets to -50 below zero.
If you do any reading on the onion fly, you’ll find doomsday level prophecy about your garden. From not being able to grow allium forever to picking up and moving your garden a mile, there’s little good news out there. We successfully pioneered a methodology to recover from them and if you’re curious, you’ll find a link down in the comments about it.
But, if you’re interested in frost protection, you can also use hoops like these to install frost cloth to protect your plants in the shoulder season. If you were looking to increase ambient air temperatures, you could also use hoops to install UV rated plastic, basically creating a “poor man’s” hoophouse.
We did create our hoops to be in what’s called a “high hoop” configuration. This basically means we created a lot of vertical space to handle taller plants, which is something we needed in our gardens. (Onions can get quite tall!) You can also use a “low hoop” configuration, should you not need particularly tall plant protections as well.
We’ve been doing things this way for quite a few years now and it’s been an absolutely fantastic method. It wasn’t particularly expensive to do and it can be used in a lot of different ways!
