Rearranging Hoop Houses

This weekend I planted my very first crops for spring: peas and spinach.  The weather was perfect and I had a few hours, so I raked the bed smooth and set up the trellis for the peas.  I planted one row of peas on either side of the trellis and one row of spinach along the outside edges of the bed.  Between each of the rows I laid down my irrigation drip line and tested it to make sure that it would water the bed well.  Any areas that remained dry were "fixed" by poking through the line with a thumbtack every few inches.  Once I was sure that the bed would be watered well, I mulched the whole thing in with some leaves that I had gathered in the fall.  The mulch will help to hold moisture in the soil and will feed the growing plants as it breaks down over the summer.  It will also reduce weed pressure in the beds so I won't have to spend as much time pulling weeds this year hopefully.

Since the season is still young, I have still been letting the chickens roam the garden during the day when I am home, so I needed to protect this newly planted and mulched bed from their destructive scratching and pecking.  For that I decided to cover the bed with a hoop house that would do double duty.  It would protect the bed from the chickens and keep the newly planted seeds warm and safe from high winds and the unpredictable weather of spring.  I decided to use the plastic that was covering the garlic bed to make this new hoop house since it already had a few small holes and I was going to make a couple more to get it to fit over the t-posts that held up the trellis.  I already had some rebar and pvc pipe laying around to be used for the frame of the hoop house, so all of the components of this hoop house were recycled.

The only problem that I had now was protecting the now uncovered garlic from the chickens.  The garlic didn't need protection from the weather anymore as I don't expect to have anymore really cold nights (we had been down to 10 degrees overnight a few weeks ago).  Garlic is a very hardy plant and I wanted them to start getting exposed to full sun so they can really start growing and filling in the bed.  I decided to leave the frame of the hoop house up around the bed and secure a roll of chicken wire around it to keep the chickens out.  This way the garlic can grow undisturbed and I can still let the chickens roam the garden to start eating all of the spring weeds that are coming up.  In a few more weeks I will start acclimating my broccoli to the great outdoors and will need another hoop house for them as well.  I like the flexibility of my poor man's hoop house as they are really simple to put up and take down which makes moving them really easy and convenient to use.  each hoop house probably cost me only $20-$30 and if I can keep them from getting torn up in the wind, they should last me several seasons.