You would think that a farm with two barns (one of them 6000 square feet), an old milk house (now tool room) and an equipment shed – soon to be milking parlor and cheese-making room – would not have a space problem. Alas, we do. Zach’s rabbit operation is expanding as his rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. He had set up the cages along the side of the barn, sheltered from the rain, but not, as it turned out, the wind. Our batch of Tractor Supply chickens, most of them roosters, quickly outgrew the picturesque but not very functional coop and yard that came with the farm. They are now truly free range birds. And to top it off, when our Bresse chickens finally arrived in early November, we had to put them in a corner of the cellar.
It may seem for a moment that I am changing the subject if I start to talk about Craigslist, which deserves a post in itself as a helpful tool for finding and getting rid of things. At any rate, I find myself checking the farm and garden category of Craigslist a couple of times a day. Last fall I saw an ad for a used greenhouse, more usefully known as a hoop house. It was from a guy in Charleston, which was a little strange in Asheville, NC, but as I was going that way to do some cemetery restoration work, I contacted him. The long and the short of it is that I came back with the hoops and the plastic for a 100’ by 15’ hoop house. I had no idea how to turn a pile of galvanized, half-round pipes and a wad of thick white plastic into something useful, which is one of the reasons the wad of plastic and pile of pipes sat around for a couple of months. But we were pressed for space. The rabbits were in their cages, swathed in blue tarps, and the Bresse chickens in the cellar were getting bigger. So right after Christmas (and after a last-minute change in location), we began to lay out the site for our hoop house, on the edge of our big hayfield, behind the big barn. The ground is relatively level there, and it was worth giving up a few bales of hay every year.
It turns out there is a lot more you need for a hoop house than hoops and plastic. Who knew? Each step of the process was hesitant, and the project was marked by changes of mind and bad decisions that had to be undone. I have not found an instruction manual for hoop house construction, and You Tube (almost as helpful for beginning farmers as Craigslist) offered lots of different ways to go from step one to step two. But we persevered and eventually got the hoops in the ground and reasonably lined up. One piece of good advice I gleaned from You Tube was not to try to put the plastic on the hoops on a windy day! That’s the sort of thing you don’t think about until you’re hanging on to a giant piece of flapping plastic that refuses to go where you want it to. Which brings up the next question in the long line of questions: what do you do to make the plastic stay where you want it to? It turns out there is some really cool stuff known generically as wiggle wire. It’s not cheap, but I am now a fan and if you decide to put up your own hundred-foot-long hoop house, I heartily recommend it.
With the plastic on, we now had ourselves a hundred-foot tunnel (technically 105’ since the 5 20-foot ridge poles all turned out to be 21’ long). Since this was to be the home of rabbits and chickens, a tunnel was a pretty useless thing. But how to close off the ends? Back to You Tube, and, at the suggestion of my kids, Pinterest. It turns out that there are a lot of really lame ways to put ends on hoop houses, and I did not find any solutions that made my heart beat faster. Since I wanted to be able to drive a truck through the house when necessary, a plastic end with a door in it was not going to do the trick.
I remembered as a kid, somewhere seeing a corrugated metal Quonset hut with a barn-type door that could open wide enough to let tractors and other large implements in and out. That became the basis for our own solution, which again was not the cheapest, but seems to be working well. So, with the ends of the tunnel securely closed we got to work putting a bed of old hay down. That killed two birds with one stone, since cleaning the old hay out of the big barn was something I had wanted to do for a long time. Once the hay was down, Zach got to work building new frames for his multiplying rabbit cages. The plan was to move the Tractor Supply chickens from the cramped chicken house into the spacious hoop house, which we did in the dark of night, throwing indignant chickens into the back of the truck (covered with a cap) and driving them into their new home.
I had not reckoned with the tenacity of chickens not to adapt to new surroundings, however, and when I let them out of the hoop house after a few days of house arrest, they immediately made their way back to their old haunts in the chicken coop and yard. Uncharacteristically, I was smart enough to admit defeat right away, and did what we should have done in the first place: we moved the Bresse chickens from the cellar to their new home, leapfrogging the older dark Leghorns. So far they show no evidence of pining for the basement, though they do not yet know how to use the roost we so thoughtfully provided for them. Zach’s rabbits seem much more comfortable in their new digs, especially when the sun shines and the inside of the hoop house loses its chill. They are also much easier to take care of now.
And there you have it; more than 1500 square feet of usable space created in about a week of work time (spread, it is true, over a month of real time), for a cost of about a dollar a square foot. Joel Salatin, arguably the most famous farmer in America – maybe the world, has long advocated for cheap and portable infrastructure, which is what our hoop house is. It certainly improved the quality of life of our chickens and rabbits. And now Zach and I can hire ourselves out as hoop house builders!
