The Winter Hoophouse

With winter setting in, I want to showcase this hoophouse.  The design was an idea inspired from The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Growers Handbook.  We bought a hoop bender from Johnny Select Seeds to shape the metal pipes and criss-crossed rope along the plastic sheet to both hold it down and conveniently open sections of it without worry of the plastic sheeting falling.

I really love this design.  It kept the chickens comfortably warm, even the crazy one that decided to try sneaking out on a night that got into the negative teens one winter.  We found her the next morning, huddled against the plastic and, somehow, still alive and perfectly fine.  She never tried that stunt again!

When we decided to breed pigs, it made the perfect home for the baby piglets to be born in.  Especially, when they ended up being due in early February

A goal I'm hoping to try out soon is to use the metal pipes for climbing vines during the summer months.

Of course, I did find one down side to having the pigs stay in the hoop house:

Our sow, Dot, kept getting excited and wanted to play with the plastic by tearing it to pieces.