Cabbage Condo
Introduction: Cabbage Condo
There's nothing like a garden harvest: homegrown broccoli florets, robust lettuces, fat heads of cabbage! That is, until you get them inside and see that they're riddled with holes and covered in slugs, earwigs and cross-striped cabbage worms, and the broccoli's unappealingly webby. You end up eating only a tiny, untouched core, or throw the whole thing out.
I renewed my interest in vegetable gardening a few years ago, after we'd removed a bunch of white pines that threatened our house here in Massachusetts, and I had real sunlight for the first time in ages. I'd tried spun row cover and PVC hoops pushed directly into the ground, but bugs got under it, and it was a hassle to pull up ground staples, pull back the row cover, then replace it after I'd tended to my plants.
Years earlier, I had built a PVC "hoop house" on a cedar frame, with the idea of setting the whole thing over a group of plants and lifting it off when necessary. It didn't work well because the ground it rested on wasn't perfectly flat, and footprints created gaps so bugs could crawl under the frame easily.
I decided to try hoops again this year, but this time, go elaborate. Rather than make the wooden frame holding the hoops out of horizontal slats as I'd done years ago, I'd turn them vertical, and have a two-frame system—an "outer frame" that would stay in place for the whole season, with a cleat around the inside for an inner frame with the PVC hoops and screening to rest on. This way, no gaps—and with a ridge pole or ridge stick which extended beyond the gable ends of the screening, I'd be able to lift the entire frame off of the plants when I needed to weed or harvest the plants. 826
The hoops would be high enough to give even tall plants like Brussels sprouts room to thrive. Window screening would allow me to water the plants and to see how they're doing without removing the cover, as I had to do with spun row cover.
My choice of wood was Western red cedar for its rot-resistance and its light weight, which makes a difference when you're trying to hoist a large structure by yourself.
Supplies
• 4' screening (available in 100' rolls online) • 4 10' pieces 1 x 6 Western red cedar for inner and outer frames • 1 10' piece 1 x 6 clear pressure treated, ripped to 4" for ridge stick (remainder was ripped to make strips to hold screening in place) • 1 8' piece 1 x 4" wood for "ridge clamp" (I used leftover mahogany from a deck demolition) • 3 10' pieces ½" PVC pipe • external screws • 8' strap or rope
Step 1: Building the Frames
You may want to build this with different dimensions for your garden, so measurements here are rough.
Cut two 10' 1 x 6 cedar boards into 6' and 4' pieces, then glue and screw them to create a 6' x 4' rectangle, with two 3" external screws going into each corner, and Gorilla glue (indoor/outdoor).
Taking inside measurements from this frame, cut appropriate lengths from the remaining two 1 x 6 cedar pieces to create a second frame that slides into the first (outer) frame with just a little clearance.
Glue and screw a cleat to the inside of the outer frame, its top 1" from the top of the outer frame. Mine was scrap mahogany, roughly 1" x ¾".
The cross-section in the photo shows how the whole thing comes together, with the inner frame resting on the cleat of the outer frame.
Step 2: Water-bending PVC Pipe
I've bent PVC hoops for garden structures before, but merely held them in shape with a wire strung between holes drilled near the ends. The Western red cedar, though light, is also somewhat brittle, and so you don't want a lot of outward pressure on the inner frame which might bend or split it. Videos found online show how you can bend PVC pipe with boiling water. It works surprisingly well.
First, lay out a 4' wide half-circle on a scrap panel of wood, with an improvised compass (a stick nailed into the panel, and a hole drilled 2' from the nail to insert a pencil). Clamp more scraps of wood to the panel, covering the line you've just drawn, and draw another half-circle, on these scraps. 644