Hoops for covering deep beds

[dinah gale]

I wonder if anyone could advise me about making hoops for covering deep beds with protective mesh etc.

My beds will be that usual 4' wide (only have one made up yet). I have bought a coil of plastic water piping and will fix dowelling or some such thing into the ends to stick into the ground.

I am unsure of how long to cut the pipe. I am thinking 6' will be enough to ensure a bit of a hoop and that the height of the coverings will be dependent on the length of the inserts.

Has anyone made these please? Any advice will be more than welcome.

I have seen these made with tree stakes which made the eventual structure tall enough to walk under.

[sewer rat]

Hi Dinah
Using my maths from when I was at school (long long long time ago) the length of pipe you need to cut to get a perfect semi circle of hoop for a 4' wide bed is 6'4". You might wanna add about 2' onto that to give you a bit of vertical clearance at either side
Hope this helps

[dinah gale]

Thank you, sewer rat, that's very helpful. Thank heavens for people who can do sums! I'll get cutting asap.

I guess I'll need to fix a horizontal bar along the top of these to hold them upright - perhaps on reflection fitting to the underside would be better to save fleece or mesh snagging and tearing. I'll experiment unless someone comes up with a definitive method.

[supersprout]

Hi dinah, I am not handy and invested in these, which have been brilliant
http://www.lbsgardendirect.co.uk/pro...sfile=1&jump=0
ss x

[dinah gale]

With the commercial hoops. Can you tell me how far apart they should be in the beds please? I'm trying to work out the economy of using them.
Dinah

[supersprout]

Spacing between 2 to 3 ft apart, depending on the length of the bed - I try to make them equidistant for Tidiness

[nick the grief]

Hi Dina,

When Geoff Hamilton made something like this a few years ago he drilled the pipe & the dowen & then stuck a galvanised nail thru to keep the dowel & the pipe attached the nail ran parallel to the be & the retaining string was fastened around this & used to trap the polythene against the hoop to stop it flapping around. I think he used plastic bailing twine so it wouldn't rot.

It looked something like this. Hope it may help

[dinah gale]

Thank you Nick. That makes a lot of sense - I'm not terribly handy but could have a go at this.

Geoff Hamilton was such a great chap, wasn't he? An organic gardener and he came up with such practical ideas to save cash. I remember a temporary garden frame he made using a large, strong cardboard box painted white, and cut to shape if I remember rightly, with a glass top. Dead cheap but worked perfectly well. Mmm - I haven't got a frame yet.....

[snohare]

I helped somebody do these very things once upon a time, and we learned very much by trial and error. If I remember correctly we did have to nail through the pipe into the dowelling in order to stop it from sliding inside when we pushed it into the ground; the other thing I remember particularly well was that we need to allow quite a bit of extra length because we were growing tallish plants near the sides of the bed and they needed headroom. To stop the hoops from bowing (the weight of snow on top of the fleece was a particular problem) we sometimes used canes, but they were very prone to chafing the fleece in wind, causing holes. Tying a string onto a nail at one end of the bed and then running it from one hoop to another with knots to hold it (and them) in place, with an attachment at the other end to keep it taut, is another way of doing it; this has the problem that the tension varies according to temperature and dampness, and the line tends to slip sideways sometimes. (You can notch the pipe slightly to get around that.)
To hold down the fleece we used to tie the loose materiel into a bunch at either end and put a string from this bunch onto a nail at the middle of the end of the bed; at the sides we usually either weighted the fleece down with broom handles or flat boards. If you want to use pegs, there are specific barbed plastic pegs for this job which are much better for this task than simple steel wire J-pegs, but be warned they are much harder to remove and cost a lot more ! As long as you can wrap whatever you use as a weight so that it will not cause chafing, I'd say this is easier than using pegs, particularly if you are going to constantly be lifting the netting/fleece for various reasons. We tended to use heavier grade fleece as the lightweight stuff was too inclined to tear; never used polythene as the fleece was so good we didn't really need to.
If you're any good at fencing work, it must be just as easy if not easier, and no doubt cheaper, to use high tensile straining wire to construct wire hoops. The secret I think would be to cut each piece of wire twice as long as you want with a little bit to spare, and then twist it back on itself and braid it by twisting one wire round the other at a constant speed and angle. (Best done by anchoring the looped end on a nailed post or such like, and then removing the nail after.) The more frequently you twist the second wire around the first, the more extra wire length you'd need to use, but the stronger it would be. Paint the ends where they go into the earth and are prone to rusting, and you would have a very robust, long serving hoop that could be modified in shape and should be totally weather resistant.
Whatever you end up with, it is a system so useful when it works you will wonder how you ever managed without it.

[supersprout]

Or for tall supports, you could try tennis balls from the Pound Shop, skewered onto stakes or bamboos

[lyndap]

This year I''ve used cane, and hose pipe(from £land again!) to make hoops across my 4foot beds.Used 4ft canes,pushed 18inches into the soil,then pushed the hose down onto the canes,then just made the 'hoop' tall enough to grow which ever crop we wanted under it(brassicas at moment).Strengthend by two 6foot canes tied along all the hoops(5 down my 11foot beds)Then draped and tied shade netting over top.Has worked really well until better half went picking stuff unsupervised He didn't fix netting back down properly and some butterflies got in

[supersprout]

That sounds good (not OH lol) I'll give that a try this year