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How to Build Row Covers (and Protect your Cruciferous Vegetables!)

June 6, 2020

Whether you’re trying to protect your vegetables from pests or extend your growing season, knowing how to build a floating row cover is a useful skill to have. While row cover kits are convenient, they can be tricky to find in-store, are often expensive, and don’t allow for a lot of flexibility in size.

You can easily create your own hoop house of any size with just a few simple supplies. I’ll show you how!

A 40 foot long row cover in our acreage garden near Saskatoon, SK, Canada in zone 3.

What is a Row Cover Made Of?

For our row covers we use frost cloth (which has a tight enough weave that will keep out bugs), rolls of plastic pipe found in the plumbing section, and either binder clips (for our backyard garden) or landscape staples (for the acreage garden). The system is fairly inexpensive and everything can be used over and over again from year to year.

Frost or bug cloth can usually be found at your local garden centre or ordered online. Order as wide of a size as makes sense for your hoops.

Our row cover tunnels at the acreage are all from one piece of garden fabric, which makes more sense, because there are less possible points of entry for bugs to get in. The ones at our house are made from two panels of garden fabric that overlap and are connected by binder clips. It’s a bit more cumbersome, but is easier to manage for watering or just taking a peek to see how the plants are doing.

Related: See how I modify the row cover for use in my raised beds here.

For the hoop house structure, we choose to use plastic pipe because it’s easy to find, is flexible, and does not require any special tools to shape it or cut it to size.

Most professional gardeners use metal pipes that they bend to size with a special tool. Both systems work, use the one you feel most comfortable with.

Brussel sprout grown under a row cover.

How do you Cover Vegetables?

When cutting the pipes to size, we have found that it’s best to cut them at an angle, so they push into the soil easier.

Once you’ve cut the pipes the same size, place them into the ground. We space ours no more than 4 feet apart, and often closer in our backyard.

Twist the fabric at one end of the hoops and secure with landscape staples. Unroll the fabric the length of the garden hoops, plus extra at the end to secure the other side. If you have two people doing the job, it’s easiest to have one person slowly unroll the bug fabric, and the other secure with landscape staples or binder clips at each side.

What Vegetables Need to Be Covered?

Technically, you can cover whatever vegetable you need to protect from frost or bugs. We cover all of our cruciferous vegetables: Cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, turnips, kohlrabi, kale, brussel sprouts, and the like.

Red cabbage grown underneath row covers.

We also have very aggressive birds at our house in the city, so we cover the vegetables they covet–lettuce, Swiss Chard, beets, and oddly enough, zinnias.

If you’re covering vegetables because of birds, you can use bird netting instead of bug or frost fabric.

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Can Row Covers Protect Vegetables From Wind?

In short, yes. But there’s a few things you should know. For a small-scale garden, I actually like to use row covers as a wind and sun protector to help with the hardening off process. The work well and as long as they are secured with binder clips and bricks they generally stay put.

Side note: Hardening off plants is hard, and I’ve found that using a floating row cover for a week after planting in the garden really helps reduce plant shock and the amount of plants that die.

However, in our acreage garden (pictured below), the wind will rip the landscape staples out of the ground, and the row cover ends up on one side of the hoops. Thankfully it has never come out altogether, but it is annoying to constantly have to put it back after we’ve had an excessively windy day. In this case, the binder clips might be more secure, but they are more expensive. When your row is 40 feet long, the costs quickly add up.

What About Watering? Can Rain Get Through?

Rain can get through the garden fabric, so you don’t need to constantly remove it. That said, not as much rain gets through the row covers as if there was no cover. I open them up for watering between rains, or if I want to take advantage of the water from a lighter rain.

Just don’t forget to close them back up again once the rain is over. Otherwise the bugs can get at your vegetables, totally defeating the point of using a row cover.

Any more questions? Anything you’d add? Let me know in the comments!

Kristen Raney

Kristen is a former farm kid turned urban gardener who owns the popular gardening website, Shifting Roots.  She is obsessed with growing flowers and pushing the limits of what can be grown in her zone 3b garden.  She also loves to grow tomatoes, but oddly enough, dislikes eating them raw.

www.shiftingroots.com

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Welcome!

Hi, I'm Kristen and I help new gardeners learn to grow their own vegetables and beautify their yards. I also share recipes that use all that delicious garden produce. Grab a coffee (and your gardening gloves) and join me for gardening tips, simple recipes, and the occasional DIY, all from the lovely city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

P.S. First time gardener? You'll want to download the quick start gardening guide below!

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Welcome!

Hi, I’m Kristen and I help new gardeners learn to grow their own vegetables and beautify their yards. I also share recipes that use all that delicious garden produce. Grab a coffee (and your gardening gloves) and join me for gardening tips, simple recipes, and the occasional DIY, all from the lovely city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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Oh friends, if any of my nice, curated photos sums Oh friends, if any of my nice, curated photos sums up how this last week went, I think it's this one.  Babies crying, trying to stay calm, outwardly looking like it's all under control, but feeling very overwhelmed.⁠
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This post isn't gardening related, so feel free to scroll by if you're here only for the gardening content.⁠
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Thankfully it's January, and I keep reminding myself that the Internet will not break if I don't keep to my self-imposed posting schedule.  But it doesn't make a week full of teething-and-not-sleeping baby any easier. ⁠
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Felicity slept through the night for the first time ever last Monday, then proceeded to punish us with frequent wakings and terrible sleep until Saturday.  And as tough as this is in regular times, in Covid times its extra frustrating because I don't have my village.⁠
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I can't just call up another Mama friend and go for coffee at her house.  I can't take my son out for a Mommy-and-Dominic date because everything he'd want to do isn't really much of an option.  There's no playgroup or play place to just drop in on.  And forget just taking everybody out to get groceries just for a change of scenery.⁠
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I know people have way more serious problems than this, and I hope I don't sound whiny and entitled, it's not my intention.  Please know that I'm very grateful for my family and job and that so far we've been healthy. ⁠
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A lot of you who follow me do so in part because you are also juggling life with very little people through this strange time.  I hope that in occasionally sharing my struggles, it makes you feel better about your struggles. (You're struggling too sometimes. . . right?)
Do you tend to plan out your garden to the nth deg Do you tend to plan out your garden to the nth degree, do you just wing it, or are you somewhere in-between?⁠
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I tend to plan it all out, and then when I actually get out in the field, so to speak, the plan changes a little bit. ⁠
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If you need a garden planner that's both pretty & practical, my garden planner is available in the ebooks section.  It's only $9 and has lots of upgrades from the previous planner.  Use code CANADA if you're Canadian to account for the exchange.⁠
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P.S. You can see exactly what you're getting in the video--no surprises. ⁠
P.P.S  I get my planner bound and printed at a printing place.  Lots of people just print their own and put the sheets in a binder.
Are you gardening in containers this year? When y Are you gardening in containers this year?  When you're shopping for vegetable seeds, look for varieties that have names with words like patio, tiny, small, etc.  While lots of vegetable varieties will do fine in a container, you'll have an easier time with ones that are specifically bred for that situation.⁠
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📸 by @blushbrandphotography
I'm living the pepper dream in this photo. While I'm living the pepper dream in this photo.  While these ones are a bit on the small side, who doesn't want ripe peppers in July in zone 3?!?! ⁠
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Over the years I've gotten better at growing peppers, and I promise I'll spill my secrets in February when it's actually time to start them.  Until then, get yourself all or one of my four favourite varieties: ⁠
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🌶️Carmen⁠
🌶️Escamillo⁠
🌶️Candy Stripe⁠
🌶️Hungarian Hot Wax⁠
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Do you have a favourite pepper variety?⁠
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Have you flipped open a seed catalogue lately? It Have you flipped open a seed catalogue lately?  It's so easy to get completely overwhelmed, especially if you're new to gardening.  Why are there so many varieties of everything and which ones do I choose?⁠
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Here's how I try to narrow it down.⁠
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🌤️ Short growing season like me?  Try and prioritize varieties that have short dates to maturity.⁠
🥗 What do you or your family actually eat?  While I think you should always try a couple of new things, there's no sense in planting a giant garden filled with vegetables that you're not going to cook with. ⁠
🥒 Do you care whether your vegetables are heirlooms or hybrids?  Heirlooms are the kind that have been around for 50+ years and you can save seeds from.  Believe it or not, this year we're prioritizing hybrids for some of our garden.  The Hermit @mgsraney is obsessed with production this year, so anything that's going in "his" greenhouse better be able to produce a lot.  I'm using more heirlooms in my "glamour garden" as we call it, because I want things that are pretty and I can save seeds from.⁠
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What do you prioritize when you're picking out seeds?⁠
Last week we started thinking about our plans for Last week we started thinking about our plans for cut flower gardening, now this week we start thinking about plans for our vegetable gardens.  Unlike cut flowers, there's not as many vegetables that need to be started ridiculously early.  However, it's still fun to plan and dream and get your thoughts sorted.⁠
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I'm curious--what size of garden do you have to work with?  Are you on an acreage or farm, city backyard, or do you have a couple of pots on an apartment patio?⁠
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As for me, I have quite a mix.  I have my container garden on my backyard deck, the small cut flower garden in my yard, then vegetables in raised beds.  We also garden at my Mother-in-law's acreage, so there's a giant garden over there where we're figuring out how to grow food on a larger scale.  Then finally, sometimes my Mom grows things for me in her garden if I'm nervous that I'll ruin them in my own garden--call it a backup garden if you will.⁠
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📸 by @blushbrandphotography
I hope you've enjoyed this week of chatting about I hope you've enjoyed this week of chatting about the best flowers to plant in a cut flower garden.  There's so many options, these 5 that I talked about all week don't even come close.  If you need more help creating a small cut flower garden, I created this plan intended for a raised bed (but you can plant it in-ground too.⁠
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Head over to my insta links page on my profile, and you'll see the button to click on that will take you directly to it.⁠
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