Ziptie will help rip the fabric. Use clips instead. I make mine out of black poly irrigation pipe same dia. as the hoop, cut ~2" long, then cut out lengthwise about 20% of the radius. You may want to sand-melt burrs off to have the cover last longer.

Dan

Brandon: the floating row covers work particularly well on vining crops. Ordinarily (speaking from a commercial perspective), a light to medium weight cover would be used. As you probably know, the heavier the cover, the more light it excludes. For C3 crops like cole crops the low light level should be less of a growth inhibitor than for the C4's like tomatoes. Tunnels utilizing clear plastic woud be a better bet for the tomatoes, tomatoes would benefit from the higher (sunny) day time temps. under clear plastic tunnels. Where the heavy covers are usually employed is in temporarily covering many different cool season veggies during a cold snap, not for prolonged periods of time trying to get a crop in extremely early.

Floating row covers laid low on the low lying vining crops will not tear up the crop much if at all under high wind; however, something like tomatoes or young broccoli plants would not fare so well.

Try different combinations and see what works for you this year. In my climate, we have a large majority of cloudy days in the spring which largely negates the benefits of both row covers and low tunnels.