Low Ride'n: Low Tunnel Hoop Houses

I decided to try to extend my growing season for the fall by building hoop houses.  Winters here can be unpredictable; sometimes warmer than usual, sometimes a snow storm or two, but I figure hoop houses will extend my growing season long enough for some cool weather crops throughout winter regardless. And of course, I'm on a budget so my DIY hoops needed to be cheap!

Basically for 3, 4 ft. X 4 ft. raised beds, I used 6, half inch diameter X 10 ft. long PVC tubes and one, 1 inch X 10 ft. long tube and 1 hacksaw.  I cut the one inch diameter tube into eight, 6 inch high tubes for the corners of my two lower sided beds and four, 12 inch high tubes for my higher sided bed.  The cut tubes were then buried into the corners of the beds and the 1/2 inch diameter tubes were bent and inserted into the buried tubes.

Voila! Hoop Houses! And I spent all of $22,which included purchasing a hacksaw!

Now I just need to cover each hoop structure with plastic once the weather cools. 

In the above pic, there are 1 gal. plastic water jugs buried in the bed.  I wanted to try to make cheap ollas by punching holes in the lower half of the jugs and burying them.

I'm not sure how well they will work. The jugs don't seem to hold much water since it starts to drain immediately, which I think defeats the whole purpose of using traditional ollas for water conservancy. I see myself constantly filling these jugs and I am not down with that.  I may just go ahead and spend a little extra money and make them out of terracotta pots. We'll see.