Ventilating the Hoop House

Yesterday was a beautiful warm and sunny day spent working in the garden. The hoop house hit 85 degrees, which made me realize that it's going to get too hot in there in the coming months. My first instinct was to cut some windows in the plastic, but Ryan suggested I do some research before doing anything drastic. 

In my research, I found that people typically ventilate their hoop houses with either roll up walls, or roll down windows. We don't have windows in ours, so I figured roll up walls would be the simplest and most effective option. The only problem was that I had used screws to hold our PVC clips in place...

All I had to do was take out those screws, move the clips up a bit, then drill them back into place. Now that the clips are higher, I can roll up the wall to let some heat escape. So far I've only done one wall, but if it gets much hotter I'll do the other side as well. The goal is to keep it below 90 degrees in there!

Walls rolled down

Walls rolled up for ventilation

Inside view with walls rolled up

Rolled walls held in place with large binder clip

For more details on how we built our hoop house, see the post Hoop House Gardening.