FIFTH IN AN ONGOING SERIES
NUTS & BOLTS & DREAMS: A beginner's guide to farming

HOOPHOUSE HOW-TO, PART 1:
Hoophouse dreams -- building a beginning
Anchoring your farming dreams in the bedrock of your own soil

By Don DeVault

MARCH 21, 2003, Emmaus, PA: Some time ago, while you were still taking daydreaming weekend drives through the countryside, you read an article by some guy named Don who said if you wanted to get started farming you should buy a hoophouse . . . and maybe you did.

Now it’s a Friday afternoon in mid-April and you’ve got a call at the office from an irate truck driver screaming through static on his cell phone. He’s stuck in the mud. You apologize for the shape of the driveway, knowing that term can only loosely be applied to the muddy ruts cutting up to a small pump house shed in the middle of an otherwise empty field you proudly call ‘Dog In the Sun Farm’.

You’d meant to get off work early to meet the man who’s now very upset that you didn’t, so you hang up the phone and announce in a tone that sounds wildly out of place to the drone in the next cubicle over that you’ve got to go. You rush to your car and beat it to the farm to get the truck unloaded, unstuck and going again.

You can’t hide your excitement despite the complications, and though the truck driver might be right from his side to think the smile with which you arrive betrays the fact that you’re out of your mind, a generous tip after unsticking his truck sends him off forgiving and wishing you luck.

But you don’t need luck. You have vision. And instructions telling you what to do with the bundles of steel pipe stacked sinking into your supersaturated spring soil. You have a sledge hammer, level, ladder, socket wrench set, spud bar, shovel, screwdriver, rechargeable battery-powered drill and saw, some 300 feet of untreated lumber (mostly 2' X 4's and a few 2' X 6's), 96 feet of wiggle-wire channel-lock, a box of 4-inch nails, half a dozen boxes of nuts, bolts and washers, and a big roll of plastic.

Cold, tired, muddy and positively bubbling, you force yourself to take a moment in the fading light of day to let it sink in that this is just the beginning.

Good bones: And extra $700 or $800 can get you 70% more air volume. Only you can decide what size is right for you.

The hoophouse kit design you finally decided on is a 21- X 48-foot gothic arch structure with roll-up sides from Ed Person of Ledgewood Farm in New Hampshire. It cost you $1,403, plus shipping. With the rest of the materials you need to complete the project, it might put you a bit over budget, but as the good Doctor said, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”

With $2,000 in the bank, you were initially considering a 14- X 96-foot quonset hut-style design. You found a number of suppliers who could have provided one for less than a grand, which would easily have kept you under budget. But a visit to a neighboring farm, where you saw and walked through a 14- X 96-foot quonset hoop from Pipe Engineering and several larger Ledgewood gothic arches, changed your mind. Last summer, your neighbors told you, they grew towering tomatoes in their Ledgewood houses with 5’6” high sidewalls and a 12-foot peak, while in the 14- X 96-foot quonset hoop you had to stoop to walk through.

When you called Ledgewood with what you thought were probably a few stupid questions, and got to talk with Ed Person in person, it sealed the deal. He knew what he was talking about, and the answers you got prompted some questions you hadn’t even given consideration.

Ledgewood offers a variety of sizes, including a 14- X 96-foot gothic arch hoop kit for $1,075 and a 17- X 96-foot kit for $1,825. Three feet wider. So what’s the big difference, besides price? The 17- X 96-foot has 70 percent more air volume! Which you know ensures immensely better air circulation and temperature consistency.

So you knew you wanted to go with a taller gothic design than the quonset you initially thought about, and now wider seemed a good idea, too.

But what about your budget?
You generally see hoophouses in three lengths: 48, 96, and 144 feet. It was Ed who suggested that you begin with the 48-foot kit, noting that if you plan well, you can easily expand it. Your budget dictated width. The 21-foot width seemed optimal for your budget—more floor space than the 17-foot width, great cross-ventilation, and not as expensive as the 30-foot width.

Now here it is.

And there you are, staring at it.

Go home and feed the dog. We start building tomorrow.

Driving your first anchor pipe
You have your area squared out already, allowing for planned future expansion, an eventual 21 X 96 feet running lengthwise, East-West to give you full southern exposure. You’ve staked the area your budget allows the first time out, giving yourself an extra foot on each end, which makes your immediate work space 21 X 50 feet.

Run a string along each length nine inches above the ground. Measure a foot in along the length from one corner post, and grab an anchor pipe, the driving bolt and sledge. Make sure the end of the anchor pipe with two holes drilled in it is UP, and the pipe is set flush against the inside edge of one of the lengths drawn off by the string.

Drop the large driving bolt into the top of the anchor pipe and begin gently, squarely tapping the head of the driving bolt to pound the anchor pipe straight into the ground. (If you’re a heavy-handed John Henry with the sledge you may well buckle the top lip of the anchor pipe. If you do this, the bow won’t fit into the anchor pipe, so you’ll have to pull the pipe out, flip it around, and drill out the bottom end of the anchor pipe to match the pre-drilled top end.) Drive the anchor pipe in until the top hole reaches the level of the string, nine inches from the ground.

Some folks like to dig a hole and drop the anchor pipe into the ground with a dollop of concrete, but we’ve never had problems not doing this. And seeing as you’ll later bolt baseboards onto the anchor pipes, it seems to me the foundation’s sound enough without the extra work.

Now fit one of the notches in the four-foot wooden template over the first anchor pipe. The next anchor pipe will fit into the other notch in the template, and you’ll drive the pipe in against the string just like you did the first time. When you hit a rock, pick your favorite expletive and let it fly. Repeat once. Maybe twice. Dig the rock out with your shovel and spud bar. And when you realize hitting the rock both bent the bottom and buckled the top end of the anchor pipe, rendering it useless, I advise you let a few more expletives fly. (It won’t fix the pipe, but you’ll feel better.) To fix the pipe, just cut a couple inches off one or the other end of the pipe and try again.

When all your anchor pipes are in, go back along the lengths with your Phillips head screwdriver. Stick it through the holes in the anchor pipes and use it to turn the pipes so that the holes open perpendicular to the length. Then you can double-check the level along the length by laying one of your 2 X 4s across the top of the anchor pipes and setting your level on top of the board.

It’s not rocket science, folks.

It’s starting to look like a greenhouse … assembling the bows and purlins
Now, to assemble the bows, I suggest placing two bow halves into their respective anchor pipes. Insert the bow halves, matching up the holes on the bow halves with those on the anchor pipes. Bolt the bow halves to the anchor pipes, climb your ladder with a bow connector or cap piece and complete the bow. A little ‘finesse’ and a few more expletives may be necessary, but this method is much easier (and feasible for a single pair of hands) than trying to insert a fully assembled bow into two anchor pipes, as the instructions suggest. You’ll do this a dozen times, and then you’ll move on to the purlins--the pipes that run the length of the house, shoring up the framework of the bows--and the cross-ties.

Securing the purlins may well be the most fun you’ll have on this project. It may, in places, require some additional drilling and a whole dictionary of expletives. If you’re working on your own, use a bit of wire looped around a bow to hold the far end of the purlin in place while you work to secure the other.

When you finish with the purlins and cross-ties, your steel skeleton is complete, and quite possibly, so is your weekend. If you’ve got a little daylight left, it’s time to begin bolting on the baseboards, hipboards, and then frame out the ends . . . but more on that next week, when I’ll help you finish off the house and get it covered. After that, we’ll start planting. 'Till then, get some rest. You deserve it. (And idle time will soon be in short supply.)