Hoop frames are a simple and affordable way to protect your garden and extend the growing season.

This year on our small farm, we are working to increase our production for sale at farmers’ markets. One of the ways we are doing this is to make our family garden into a market garden.

While many books and experts discuss market gardening (see Jean-Martin Fortier’s book, for instance), this post will focus solely on creating easy and cheap hoop frames for vegetable and flower gardening.

My husband and I have been gardening for our family for twenty years. Truth be told, we were both raised in families that produced huge gardens yearly for canning and freezing, so we have participated in the process a lot longer! However, this will be our first season implementing hoop frames in our garden, and I absolutely can’t wait to see the difference.

You see, if you haven’t gardened, you might not be aware of the damage a few little beasties can cause. Of course weeding is a major factor in garden success, but bug damage is usually our biggest issue. Every time I grow broccoli I think I have managed to avoid those nasty little green worms, and every time, they show up either in the cooking process or the container in the refrigerator. YUCKY! It’s time for some hoop frames and row covers!

The Making of $6 Hoop Frames…

Our first step was to create the size of the hoop necessary to cover our raised beds. Here are the materials we used for this:

• 5-foot scrap of 1/2-inch plastic cpvc pipe (we used a 10-foot piece for our 30-inch rows)
• (4) 10-foot pieces of 1/2-inch EMT conduit
• Scrap 4×8 piece of plywood
• Scraps of 2x6s & 2×12
• Pencil
• Measuring Tape
• Impact Driver or Drill
• Angle Grinder (for cutting metal conduit in half to 5-foot sections)
• Jigsaw (for cutting the top curve of the template)
• 3-inch screws

After measuring out the width of the raised bed, I marked that distance at the bottom of our 4×8 piece of plywood. This will be how wide the hoops need to be. I then held the scrap piece of CPVC on those two marks and my husband traced the hoop. (The first picture below shows the setup for the 30-inch hoops using the 10-foot conduit.)

From here we started screwing small pieces of the 2x6s to form the shape of the hoop.

Our first couple of attempts didn’t go as planned, so we modified our design. (See how there’s a crimp in the hoop frame? That’s from a sharp edge on the 2×6!)

This caused us to reassess and use the jigsaw to cut a curved piece from a scrap of 2×12. This worked much better! (Not only did this curve work for our 2-foot wide raised beds, but we repurposed it for use with the 30-inch rows for the main garden.)

Working with one side of the hoop at a time, my husband bent the EMT conduit around the top of the curved 2×12 about three-quarters of the way. We then flipped the conduit, putting the straight side into the template and bending the same distance. This created a much more uniform hoop frame.

Project Thoughts…

While our first hoops were not as smooth as I’d like, they were only $6 for each piece of EMT conduit. (For our raised beds, we used 5-foot sections of metal conduit, so that’s only $3 each!) The more hoops we made, the better we got, and the more smooth the final products!

Garden hoop benders can be purchased online from places like Johnny’s, if you’d rather do that. We just don’t have the $100+ in the budget for that right now.

Many people have suggested the use of rebar as an anchor for the garden hoop frames, but I just stuck each side of the conduit into the soil until they felt secure.

I will be tethering each hoop frame together with small rope and covering with row cover in the coming days. As you can see in a picture above, now we only have greenhouse plastic down to warm the soil and keep it dry…it’s doing a great job of sprouting weed seeds, too, so I’m hopeful the weed crop will be less.

If you like DIY Gardening Projects, you might like to check out our posts on how to Vacation-Proof Your Garden, Tips for Indoor Seed Starting, and Using the Phases of the Moon to Plant Your Garden.

If you’d like to see what products I used for our Simple Garden Hoops, please see below. Please know, these contain affiliate links. This means I earn a small commission on any sales, at no extra cost to you. The income I earn helps to pay for maintaining my blog. Thank you so much for your support!