Building a DIY hoop house for under $1,000

Two winters ago, my dad and I built a 12'x24' hoop style greenhouse in our backyard. I was trying to make a little extra money selling vegetable seedlings (read about it here). We were looking for something that would be fairly simple and inexpensive to set up, and came up with a design modified from others we found online.



DIY Hoop House Plans

1. First, we leveled the ground in the area and dug trenches around it. We installed pressure treated boards in the dimensions of the greenhouse. These would become support for the rebar later in the build.

2. Next, we installed landscape fabric as a weed barrier and backfilled on the outside of the pressure treated boards. 

3. In the top right, you can see rebar on the inside of the boards. Three foot pieces of rebar were buried two feet into the ground, leaving 12 inches above ground at two foot intervals.

4. I believe the PVC we used in this step was 1" schedule 40 in twenty-one foot lengths. With two people, it was fairly easy to bend and put the ends over the rebar. It looked a little "off" in places at first, but once the weather warmed in the spring everything evened itself out nicely. 

5. We also used the same PVC to make a midridge down the middle which would help in keeping the arches evenly spaced at the top. It was just zip tied to the arches at this point, but later in the build we secured it to the endwalls as well.

6. We built the endwall frames with 2x4s. At this point, make sure you figure out where the door and potentially windows will be. 

7. We screwed the midridge down to the top of the endwall frames but left it zip tied to the arches. 

Here's a picture of the inside of the door just to show how we framed it.

7. The endwalls were made of 4'x8' panels of a material called SmartSide Panels. It's more resistant to fungus and termites, so we chose it as a better option than plywood for a greenhouse that gets wet often. 

8. We added some extra support boards along the sides when we installed the endwalls. This would also allow us to make an air bubble between two layers of poly film covering for better insulation. We could double the covering, then sandwich it between two boards and leave some loose at the bottom. The end result would be a well insulated double layer covering with roll-up sides for good air-flow.

9. Before covering the greenhouse, we put pipe insulation over the tops of the endwalls to prevent tearing and prolong the life of the covering. 

10. Flexible plastic tubing laid along the outside and screwed down holds the covering in place. 

11. For the roll-up sides, we connected several lengths of one inch PVC and made a T at each end. We capped the sides of the T, leaving one uncovered, and filled it with play sand, shaking as much of the sand as we could into the whole pipe. This made it heavier to weigh down the sides in case of cold and wind. Duct tape held the pipe onto the end of the plastic covering. When rolled up, there are nails attached to the side boards which it can be rested on. We had problems with it trying to spring back and unroll, and the only solution we came up with was to wedge a board so it would prevent the T from spinning.

12. We installed a blower inflator to keep air between the layers of the plastic covering. This goes a long way in insulating the greenhouse. 

During the early spring months, we did heat with a small propane heater. I don't think I have pictures unfortunately. 

The entire project cost us somewhere around $800. We built some greenhouse benches and a potting bench, but this year my dad build some raised beds inside it and he's growing a gorgeous tomato crop. It would work well for just about any gardening application I can think of. You could even forego the landscape fabric and grow directly in the ground, as long as your tiller and other tools can fit through the door. The size of the greenhouse could be altered as well. There are plenty of calculators online to figure out blower size, covering size, and heater size, and the calculations for the length of PVC needed are fairly simple as well.

If you're considering building a simple, functional greenhouse on a budget, this setup was super straightforward. If you have any questions about the process, don't hesitate to contact me via email or in the comments below.

-Rose

My attempt at starting a home business selling organic seedlings

When I lived in New England, I struggled with the short growing season. As a student and a mom, it was difficult to make time for anything other than school or my daughter anyway. Money was tight and I was living with my [extremely supportive] parents. I worked at a greenhouse during the summer months and made some money, but once that ended in the fall and I went back to college classes, I needed to find some other way to make money.

I noticed that in my area, more and more people were looking for organic options when it came to food. However, there were no greenhouses within a large radius focused on providing organic herb and vegetable starts.

Personally, I prefer to garden and eat crops grown conventionally. I'm sure I'll lose a few of you on this topic, because those who care about it really care about it. Here's my stance; organic growing methods are often equally or more harmful to humans than conventional methods. Sure, organic practices can be better for the soil, but I am a firm believer that they have little to no effect on human health, and that they produce far less food for a higher cost economically and environmentally.

But that's a topic for another post.

So, seeing that there was a demand for organically grown vegetable seedlings in the area, I decided to start my little "business". I set up a Facebook page and started taking early orders and upfront payments for seedlings in order to cover the startup costs. I bought my [untreated, non GMO] seeds, my organic seed starting mix, pots, and labels. At this point, it was still February and there was no way I could start this huge quantity of seedlings in my parents' living room. I needed a greenhouse.

I started looking online for the cheapest greenhouses I could find. Eventually, I decided that in order to get the space I was needing, I'd have to build one. My dad and I found these plans and slightly modified them for our needs. The end result was a 12x24 foot hoop house with solid end walls, roll-up sides, heated with this heater. It worked incredibly well for its purpose, as long as I remembered to shut off the heater during the day (it did hit close to 100 degrees in there during sunny days, even in February if the heater was on). My gramps built me some simple greenhouse benches and a potting bench. The total cost came out to somewhere around $800, with the most expensive pieces being the PVC and the covering. I'll post pictures of our build in another post if you guys want.

By mid May (I think last frost date for my area was May 15th) I had seedlings big enough to sell. Unfortunately, many of them hadn't germinated. I mostly had problems with my herbs. I think I ended up with something ridiculously low, like ten percent germination across all my herbs. I had even planned ahead and planted 25% extra of everything, just in case. I ended up having to reimburse a lot of people who had paid back in February. Fortunately, many of them were family and generously refused the refund, which helped to cover the reimbursement for other customers.

Through this experience, I did learn a lot.
1. I learned to advertise a product using social media.
2. I learned to be honest and communicate with customers.
3. Don't count your seedlings before they germinate.
4. I came to the conclusion that I am much happier growing for myself, rather than growing what/how others want me to grow.

If you want to check out what I had and see a few pictures of the setup, here is the Facebook page I made for my little endeavor. Now that I've moved out, my dad is using the greenhouse to grow tomatoes. He replaced the benches with raised beds. I haven't seen them in person yet, but they look great in pictures and I can't wait to see how it turns out!

-Rose