PVC Hoophouse

I mentioned in my post titled "How we got our name" that we had built a small hoophouse made of PVC pipe and plastic in our back yard when we lived in town.  I'd like to elaborate on this in case any of our readers want to do the same. 

The first thing you should know is that your taxes will go up!  The tax assessor apparently looks at aerial pictures of your backyard to determine if any permanent structures such as storage buildings have been added.  We had NO idea that this PVC pipe and plastic hoophouse in any way qualified as "permanent".  But, it did and our taxes went up something like $15 per year.  Okay, so that is not that much.  However, I was surprised to know that "big brother" was watching us!

Next, there are lots of free plans on the internet...just search for "pvc pipe greenhouse plans".  We embellished ours somewhat by adding some wood framing to make it sturdier.  There are some things the free plans may not tell you.  One is that PVC pipe and plastic don't like each other.  They react chemically so that the plastic disintergrates after a few months every where that it touches the PVC pipe.  We learned this the hard way.

We tried a couple of things to keep this from happening.  First was to get some of that foam pipe insulation and put over the pipe.  That worked okay, but the foam did not hold up very well in the hot Oklahoma sun and pretty much fell apart after the first summer.  The next thing we tried was more successful and that was to paint the PVC pipe.  Since we had to replace the plastic anyway after it lost its battle with the PVC pipe, we painted the pipe before we put new plastic on.  We had no problems after that.

This is a picture of our "homemade" hoophouse that we built in our backyard when we lived in town.