Tougher Tunnel/Tube Type Greenhouse Frame (temporary type for plastic/shade cloth covers)
Here’s an idea for those of you in very windy places—something I thought of a couple of years ago. Get a quarter mile of barbless wire (yes, the kind without barbs). Erect semicircular hoops of grey, plastic, UV-resistant conduit, as others have done before.
Drill the conduit horizontally, and loop the barbless wire once around each pipe, working your way horizontally through the pipes for the tube. Anchor the barbless wire ends at each end of the tube. When you have enough horizontal wire strands through the whole structure (and vertical, if needed), cover with shade cloth and/or plastic. Maybe even 4 mil plastic will be heavy enough, if your grid lines are close together enough. Use large enough sheets of cover material to adequately anchor it on all sides with earth or whatever (might be better than putting holes in plastic for fastening to pipes).
There you are—a stronger tunnel-type frame for your garden without big costs. Winds in my area often hit over 60 mph in the summer (sometimes higher in dust tornadoes, er, dust devils) and over 100 mph in winter. Using the barbless wire, higher tubes can built and used with plastic in two layers to passively collect solar heat for whatever uses in the winter. Anyway, the frame with barbless wire can be uncovered, when the cover is not needed. The cover can be stored and used again, lowering costs a little more.
By the way, here at over 9,000 feet, near the Divide, we’ve been seeing a little relief from the drought so far. Looks like half-monsoon weather. Some afternoons, it rains. Others, it doesn’t. It’s an improvement over last year. Watch out for unusual cold fluctuations, though. We saw some of those last winter and don’t know what will happen next winter. But within the next 6 years or so, we might see cold fluctuations unlike any we’ve seen in our lives (maybe just past our very low solar max in this extended minimum—only a guess). There will be hot fluctuations, too, but not as noticeable for most of us as the cold ones.
Have fun. Enjoy the adventure.
A good solution it seems.
Here are the simple ways I have tried for my raised beds:
Use a sledge hammer to drive rebar into the ground at all 4 corners. Take two equal lengths of PVC pipe length depending on how tall you want the structure.
Put the pipe over the rebar and push it into the ground(the wooden frame around the garden helps to stabilize it) at diaganol corners. Tie the intersections together with strong rope. Cover with plastic attached to poles and anchored by heavy firewood for green house effect.
For shade use a fence or rebar and pvc or leftover metal pipes on one side of the bed. You will have two vertical pipes over the rebar. Attach the pipes with a horizontal pipe and elbows attached to the vertical.
From these you can hang cattle panel or netting for vines to climb. You can also use a shade cloth attached at the top and brought forward lean-to style and anchored by tent stakes for shade from the sun during the hottest part of the day.