no. Cucurbits particularly are not even remotely frost hardy and they positively sulk in cool soils while they wait for disease to find them. Wait until your days are in the 70s and nights at least the 50s before committing them to the outdoors. Peppers will refuse to grow at all in those temps. This is the problem. Put a warm season plant into cool soil and it just will not grow nor can it get the nutrients it needs from the cool soil so it is a very weak plant under those conditions and any adversity (pest/disease) will likely kill it or set it back enough that it never performs well. Much better to wait. Hoop houses are nice, but they really don't provide more than a few degrees of protection from the cold nights. Your best use of a hoop house is to get an early start with cool season plants, not so much the warm season plants that not only require warm air, but warm soil. Also, extending the season for the cool weather plants.

Buy old sheer fabric curtains from garage sales & thrift stores for a fraction of the cost of the commercial row cover. They're light enough to lay directly on top of plants on cool nights. To prop up you could use empty glass or plastic bottles or jugs on stakes or try upturned plastic crates on stakes. I've also used reused upside down clear plastic containers from bakery items, product packaging, & storage containers like Sterlite or Rubbermaid weighed down with a rock or a thick stick. Prop up a corner with a stake to allow for ventilation during the day. Can also stack brick or blocks of wood on the sides to support the containers for higher plants. It looks a bit crazy with the various containers & more unified with the sheer fabric curtains. In the fall we regularly cover plants with the curtains in early evening & remove in mid-morning. If more than damp I bring them inside to dry, but if not I'll just put them inside my car to put out again the next night. Our gardens are along the driveway so the car is a handy spot out of the way. They don't really get too dirty & with 2 people holding each end you can snap them a bit to fling off dirt or water.

Hi Cyndi, I don't think you ever told us if your heat was turned back on in your house. (Are you moving out into the yard under plastic to stay warm? ;o) When do ya'll typically begin planting cool and hot season items within a hoop house? I set one up the first of March one year. Then we got a late snow storm and it collapsed - but with some melting and shaking, it sprang back up. I haven't set one up so early since but have sometimes covered the larger (8' by 20') hoop house this early. I'm not in the Denver area but I'm shooting for planting cool-season veggie seed in there before the 21st of March. I use one or 2 smaller hoopies for flats of plant starts that I don't have room for elsewhere. I have covered growing beds in the gardens with them in the past, however. What is the hottest I should let it get for the cool season veges and hot season? In any protected growing, keeping the temperatures below 85°F is a very good idea. I suppose that 5°F below that would be about maximum for the cool-season types. How should I ventilate (ends, sides, etc) and how much for each temperature range. I bunch the plastic at the ends of the little hoopies and tie it to a stake driven in the ground. As the sun warms the air inside, I slide the bunched plastic up the stakes so outside air enters at ground-level. Unless it's windy, lifting both ends is necessary to gain some ventilation but you don't need to lift the plastic very high. Is my house too high? You wouldn't want it too low. How does height affect the temperature. The greater the volume of air, the longer it takes to heat. And, I suppose, the longer it takes to cool. The air volume acts as a cushion for rapid changes of temperature. That's a good thing, especially on sunny days. How long should I have it installed before beginning to plant (raising soil temps)? It depends on the variables but you can put most any thermometer into the soil a couple of inches, cover it completely, and check it after 10 minutes, or so. Most cool weather veggies will germinate quickly if the soil temperature is above 65°F. What should I use for clamps with the plastic? My neighbor used split black plastic pipe but the entire thing must not have worked very well since he never set it up again. I don't use any clamps - just tie the ends to stakes driven in the ground and then criss-cross with bailing twine over the top and tie the twine to 4 more stakes. The sides are held down by bricks. Since it is so small, the wind shouldn't have very much affect on it. Is there a way to keep it warm when it gets really cold? You can put a blanket over the top of it. I know that jugs of water are sometimes used for heat retention but that decreases the inside space. Hope this helps. digitSteve

Whatever you do, don't put rocks in them :) They will just take up space and reduce the space available for materials that will break down and produce nutrients. I know it is hard when you have limited money with which to fill raised beds, and I always have the same concerns about the "wood" compost, but I am filling some new beds myself and have a sort of method that is working out for me. It is based on the newer method of raised beds called "hugelkultur." I have a couple new 4x8 beds that are 12" deep. The "soil" they sit upon is really "fill"--gravel and sandy sterile dirt put there when the house was built I guess. So it is hard and not useful for gardening, but will drain fairly quickly. I built a bed, then I dig down into the rocky "fill" inside the box another 12" below grade (this bed will be for veggies with large root systems eventually). Then I filled that space with pruning wood from an old apple tree I have, stomp it down and fill it again and stomp it down, so there is an almost 12" deep layer of wood. building the bed and part of the pruned wood I will fill it with This is the second mass of wood before being stomped down Ready for the next layers After that I covered the wood with a layer of grass clippings I don't have photos for the other layers, but then I added a layer of horse manure and alder sawdust. The horse manure is from a neighbor (look on craigslist under "free" or "farm and garden") and is not completely "finished" composting and neither is the sawdust, but it doesn't have any manure or ammonia smell anymore. I added some compost from my own pile, but that isn't completely composted either. The top layer is only a few inches of whatever *good* soil I can scrape together--usually a mix of peat, old container mix, vermiculite, etc. Then I add amendments (= fertilizers) that I buy in bulk by the pound by the local eco-groovy farm and garden store: a nitrogen (N) source like fishmeal, bloodmeal, cottonseed meal, bat guano, or alfalfa dust; a phosphorus (P) source like bonemeal or soft rock phosphate; a potassium (K) source like greensand, and other rock dusts, kelp meal or whatever for micronutrients and minerals. The best "top layer" if you had nothing to work with would probably be a mix of purchased material , if you had the money, like a good compost mix, peat or coir peat, and something for drainage like perlite or rice hulls or vermiculite. Plus amendments for N, P, K, and micronutrients as mentioned above. A little goes a long way. Extravagances if you had the money might be worm castings, biochar, or some really nice bagged planting mix with compost. Filling a 12-inch deep 4x8 bed takes a full yard of soil, so it is too expensive for me to buy that amount of good growing mix at the moment. The wood acts as a water reservoir as it rots and gradually holds more and more water after the winter rainy system and gradually composts down there. It also probably has air down there that helps. The grass clippings and manure are both high in nitrogen that will help balance out the carbon in the wood to compost down. I honestly didn't think I would grow much in this bed in the same month I filled it, because there was only a few inches of soil before the more unfinished materials below, but I planted fast-growing green veg in the cabbage family that like high nitrogen in it: bok choy, broccoli raab, kale, and mustard greens. These are absolutely thriving--here it is 35 days later and this is after I have been eating a lot of the greens already: Only the 4 plants in the far back corner were planted as starts. The rest were all directly seeded into the bed. I estimate I have eaten at least twice as many greens from this bed already as you see presently, by harvesting/thinning plants and cutting leaves from plants as the babies sown in between the rows start needing sun. I could actually have five productive rows in here and probably eat greens every day or two and they would be replacing that growth almost at the same rate. These plants in the cabbage family can be harvested only about 35 days after planting from seed--super productive and super healthy either raw or in stir-fries or added to pastas, etc. The more bitter ones, like broccoli raab and mustards (Brassica rapa) are very yummy when quickly sauteed with chopped garlic and some olive oil, a little squirt of lemon after, maybe some chopped nuts, and added to pasta or eaten alone like that. Here is what the bed looks like 24 hours of the day apart from when I water it, using just black poly pipe from Lowes or Home Depot for hoops If it's not covered, cabbage family plants here get decimated by the little green worms that come from the white cabbage butterflies. Aaaand, I'm going to do a second bed like this and plant with non-cabbage green veg: lettuce, chard, orach, spinach, cilantro, and basil. It won't have to be covered for the worms, but will be covered the same to protect from deer. This works as a mini-hoophouse and can be made warmer with perforated clear light plastic row cover, or for overwintering greens can be covered with greenhouse film purchased by the foot. My tomatoes this year are going into large black plastic nursery pots, with a bottom layer of rocks for drainage and to fill up extra space that the tomato roots probably won't need. Maybe a layer of mesh over the rocks for easily removing later. Tomatoes take a huge amount of raised bed space and the soil between is pretty much wasted in terms of producing green edible food. That's why I usually do them in pots or grow bags. I'm trying to do whatever is most efficient use of space for producing the most food, and the cheapest right now. Any of the 6" deep beds would be perfect for strawberries--delicious, superfood, produce all summer into fall, probably enough to feed you a meal every day. I am expanding my strawberries yet again this year. Lots of production, just like the brassica greens and non-brassica greens, and the tomatoes once they are producing.