You Grow Your Own Food? Winter gardening preparations part 1-How we built low tunnels

I made my low tunnel hoops today out of electric conduit. Tomorrow I can hopefully get them up in the garden. Here is what I did:

I used a post we already had in the ground as the center point at the top of the hoops. I laid out a straight board to represent the center line of the hoop.

I measured my bed at 4′ wide so I measure 2′ on each side of the center line. I took a piece of 1/2″ pvc conduit and bent it into an arc. and figured roughly where the ends would be. I put in a stake at each end put in a long screw about 1/2 way.

Here we are figuring out where the stakes should go.

I had to add two outer stakes to keep the pipe in an arc. The open ends went onto the ends of the screws. This will allow me to put stakes in along the inner edge to serve as a template.

I put a bunch of stakes in to serve as the bending template. The stakes go on the inside of the pipe.

I put a clamp on the center of the post to help hold the pipe when I bend it.

<img alt="" src="http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff173/daddymem/LHSP/LHSP%209-22-12/P1030083_zps3268fa97.jpg" width="480" height="360" /Here is a 1/2″ electric conduit on the template. It wasn’t hard to bend the pipe around the stakes.

Gavin showing one of the bent hoops.

Here are all the bent hoops. Tune in for part two-assembly.

Pretty cheap so far:
10 1/2″ electrical conduits @ $2.00 each
1 1/2″ pvc pipe @ $1.73
1 pack of two ended conduit clamps, 25 units @ $2.69