How to...

Build a hoop house or cloche frame for your Mikroclima row cover fabric
Gardeners are versatile people and many will use their ingenuity to construct a frame to support the Mikroclima .
There are many options using recycled materials or other materials easily available to buy.

We made our first hoop frames with recycled agricultural poly pipeand used an old fire guard to cover seed propagation trays. Now we mainly use 25mm poly pipe and 20mm white pvc plumbing pipe, but we are still experimenting.

Below is how we make our hoop frames. They are simple to build, are flexible in size and can be moved easily

We make our frames to fit the length of garden beds. They are very easy to take down and re-erect anywhere.
If your garden bed is too long for a standard Mikroclima garden pack it is easy to sew on another piece or you can buy custom cut lengths to fit. Remember to allow for the height of the hoop house at both ends.

To work out length of Mikroclima you need:
Garden bed length + twice the height of the frame + an extra 2Ocm for securing the ends.

Example: For a 4 metre long garden bed with a hoop 95 cm high you need 6.3 metres of Mikroclima
or 4m + 95cm+ 95cm+ 40cm = 6.3m.

This allows 20 cm of fabric at each end that can be secured with butterfly clips, timber, bricks or a garden stake inserted into a sewn seam.

How much fabric do I need?
Below is a guide to which width and length of Mikroclima or Tunnet you need

Ready to make your own hoop house? Click here for the Mikroclima fabric

You can easily cut and sew pieces of the fabric together for different size beds.
Note that 10 metres is the minimum custom cut length for Mikroclima and 5 metres for Tunnet.

Making a supporting hoop frame

You can use Mikroclima without a frame, just throw it over the plants as a floating row cover.This is quite handy when you have fruiting plants like tomatoes that need protection from birds or a newly seeded area which benefits from the extra water retention.

In our experience for growing vegetables a frame works better. Just lift the fabric when you need to weed, harvest etc. and clip it to the frame to keep it out of your way.

Poly pipe hoop frame

We use 25mm rural black poly pipe which is rigid enough to support the structure and smooth so that the Mikroclima does not catch, making it easy to lift on or off.

We cut the poly pipe 20 or 40 centimetres shorter than the width of the Mikroclima fabric so there is a ground flap left over of 10 or 20 centimetres each side. So, if our Mikroclima is 3 metres wide we cut the poly pipes to 2.6 metres. For 2 metre Mikroclima we cut the pipe 1.8 metres.

As a rule of thumb we install the hoops of poly pipe at intervals of about one metre, then adjusted to the length of the bed. 

• Use 5 hoops for 2m x 5m Mikroclima with about 50 cm drop at both ends.
• Use 10 hoops for 2m x 10m Mikroclima with about 50 cm drop at both ends.
• Use 6 hoops for 3m x 7m Mikroclima with about 100 cm drop at both ends.
• Use 4 hoops for 4m x 5m Mikroclima with about 100 cm drop at both ends.

We find this gives good stability while giving easy access to the plants growing under the Mikroclima hoop house.

The width of the bed under the Mikroclima hoop house is up to you.The narrower you make it the higher the hoops at the apex.

To hold the hoops upright we use galvanised metal rods 40 centimetres long pushed (or driven) into the ground leaving about 15 centimetres above the surface. Normally the rods would be perpendicular, but if you decided to have a very wide and low hoop tunnel you may find it better to lean them slightly inwards.

The pictures above show poly pipe sliding over a metal spike to support a hoop.

Once all the hoops are installed you are ready to cover with the Mikroclima fabric.
We allow a 10cm or 20cm flap of fabric on each side at ground level that this can be held down by bricks, pegs or lengths of timber to make it more difficult for pests to crawl underneath and chomp on your young plants.
We do not usually need to do this but just  secure the fabric with Jumbo clips to the frame at ground level.

The Mikroclima can be attached in various other ways too.

Ways to secure Mikroclima to poly pipe hoops and the ground

Jumbo clips are exceptionally easy and quick to attach and replace and do not tear the fabric. We use them to clamp the Mikroclima fabric to 25mm poly pipe hoops.

Butterfly clips can be attached to the edge of the Mikroclima fabric and pegged into the ground. Double over the fabric for extra strength.

Cut lengths of poly pipe. You can try cutting short lengths of poly pipe, splitting them lengthways and inserting them over the fabric and onto the frame pipe. There is I think a commercial version of this concept.

The fabric at the ends of the hoop houses can be secured in a number of ways, the simplest is to put a loose piece of timber or bricks on the end  or roll the timber up in any spare fabric to secure it more if you live somewhere windy. Alternatively you can gather the fabric together tie with string or a strong rubber band and peg into the ground.

More stylish methods we have tried are shown below.

A garden stake can be inserted into a seam at the end of the Mikroclima fabric to keep the end flaps in place.
This also makes it easy to handle the fabric when removing or installing. If the stake is wider than the hoop house it stops the wind blowing the ends inwards. A seam can be sewn using a domestic sewing machine.

Butterfly clips can easily be attached to the fabric, threaded with tape or string, pulled together or spread out and pegged into the ground. Remember the fewer pegs you have to remove for tending the plants the better.

Sew a seam and thread with tape or string (rubber spline used for fly screens works well ) to gather the fabric together and peg it into the ground.

The frames above are made from pvc pipe but the same methods apply to poly pipe frames.

You can of course put more than one hoop tunnel in a wide garden bed, for example if you prefer to have two small hoop tunnels side by side in stead of one big one it works just fine.

Alternative frames we have tried - just experiment and see what works fro you.

Ready to make your own hoop house? Click here for Mikroclima fabric