Thoughts on this?

DripWorks sells fifty feet of Agribon 19 (83" wide) which gives 4 degrees of frost protection (85% light transmission) for $18.95

Or, I can get the same amount of Agribon 30 which gives 6 degrees of frost protection (70% light transmission) for $23.95.

If I used the Agribon 19 most of the time and added a second layer of Agribon 30 when it got really cold, do you think that would be enough for central Oklahoma? I'm talking about growing kale, spinach, lettuce, etc. through the winter.

I'm planning to use wire hoops to suspend it over some of my beds (all of which are 2' wide) and I am building two cold frames that will have a lightweight frame covered with the row cover that sits on top in place of plastic or glass. In really cold weather I would add a second layer.

http://www.dripworks.com/product/Q_AG1983

After typing a paragragh and having it eaten by internet gremlins before I could post, I have a suggestion for you Dawn. You might want to break up the really long posts into several smaller posts. That would also help if the forums are ever moved again.

I wrapped clear plastic around my fall beds (as a wind break) but the tops are open. When it threatened to get cold I would cover them with blue tarps. After the broccoli was gone, the peas never bloomed and the lettuce got bitter it wasn't worth it any more. I still have spinach that looks good despite not being covered recently. There is even some lettuce that looks like it is alive. Collards look pretty sad. I hope the spinach and lettuce do bolt, I would like to save seed from plants that can make it through this winter! I guess my point is, it really is a lot of work. I, too, have wondered about rowcover left on all the time. The Mother of a Hubbard blog is SO inspiring. I am glad you brought this up, because I am not sure how much covering I will be willing to do in the future. I say that now, and come fall I will be planning it again ;)

I have a question. I've never used row covers but bought a shade cloth last summer. (I started the fall peas and broccoli too early, when it was too hot.) Anyway, how do you keep your row covers, blankets, shade cloths, and tarps from blowing off?

well i'll have to relearn how to post pictures again. I wish we had a preview button like the old site.

It depends on what sort of structure is supporting the row covers and also on what plants are covered, how high above the plants are, how windy it is, etc.

For general purpose use, I've always used U-shaped landscape cloth staples, which I buy in bulk from a farm supply store. If pushed firmly into the ground and if spaced close enough to each other---4 or 5' apart in most conditions---they will hold the row covers down firmly to the ground in typical spring wind speeds. I use them in amended clay and I am not sure how they'd work in very sandy soil as the wind might lift the fabric up and yank them right out of the ground.

If we are having extraordinary wind....say 40 or 45 mph or higher, I might come back and place bricks, metal t-posts, rebar or sandbags on top of the row covers every few feet in order to keep the wind from blowing the row covers away. I have less trouble with row covers placed over hoops than with row covers left floating on top of beds. Sometimes the floating ones catch too much wind and fly away. The ones on hoops seem to stay in place better, and most of my row covers are supported by hoops.

If I have to come back in late April or early May when tomato plants already are pretty good sized and cover up the plants on a windy night, I sometimes use zip ties as an extra layer of protection to ensure the row covers don't fly away. By that late in the spring, my tomato plants are going to be 2 or 3' tall or taller, so they are caged already. Zip-tying the row covers to a few of the cages helps keep them from floating away, but I also use either the U-shaped fabric staples or fence posts or 2 x 4s or whatever I have to help hold the edges down firmly to the ground.

Your row covers essentially hold in the heat between the ground and the row cover. If you let there be lots of little gaps where the wind lifts the row cover, your warm air won't stay warm because cool air will come in through those gaps, so it doesn't matter what you use as long as you use something.

I've had row covers blow off the plants a few times in late afternoon or early evening while I'm covering plants up. I just take that as a sign that I need to do a better job of weighing them down to the ground.

If you live in the country and have barbed wire fences nearby, it is imperative that your row covers are firmly affixed to the ground using whatever you can find. Otherwise, the wind will carry that row cover away and deposit it on the barbed wire fence, and it will not be usable again because it will be totally shredded. Guess how I learned that?

In a pinch, I've raided the pantry and used bottled water in 16 or 20 oz. bottles or canned food to weigh down the edges of row cover. That's what happens when you have a hard freeze coming exceptionally late after all your warm-season plants are a foot or two or more tall. You use every bit of row cover you have plus every single item you can find to way down the edges. In a real desperation move, you can shovel soil out of pathways up over the edges of the rowcover material to help hold it down, but that's very time consuming and it works best if you started out with U-staples or rebar or something else holding it down firmly while you were shoveling the soil onto the edges.

Sometimes you can use cords, tie downs, etc. It just depends on your level of experience with them. Tim can tie down row cover in ways I never dreamed of, and he can tie knots I have trouble untying the next day. When he puts a row cover over something, he intends for it to stay where he puts it.

I'll link an example of the U-shaped type earth staples I'm talking about. I have hundreds of them and have used some of them for so long that they probably are more rust than metal by this point. They come in different sizes and in different quality levels. Some are heavier and last longer before they break, some are lighter. You generally can buy them in local stores where they are sold near landscape mulch cloth type fabric or near row covers. Some places sell them with deer fencing to help pin the fencing down to the ground. Some irrigation companies sell them with drip irrigation supplies so they can be used to hold your drip lines in place. When you find them at stores, you may find little bags or boxes of a dozen or 25 or 50 or whatever. When you order them online, you can find boxes of 500 at many suppliers, but shipping will drive the price up pretty high.

I like using rebar and metal t-posts just as much as the U-shaped staples. They all work. When bad weather threatens and you're working to protect your plants (and you don't have much time to get it done), you'll be creative and find ways to hold down the fabric.

You also can use plastic clips that clip over the low tunnels's support bars, if your low tunnels are supported by hoops made of PVC or EMT, but I find those clips pretty pricey. Some people make their own clips by cutting up PVC pipes. I've never tried that.

I don't put row covers over my beds until the dogs and cats are indoors or until I've closed gates to keep them out of the garden. Our pets think row covers over hoops are just cat or dog beds or hammocks and, as you might imagine, the row covers are not meant to support the weight of house pets.

U-Shaped Anchor Pins

shaded tomatoes

I used 1" gray electrical pvc. maybe you can see the 45 degree fittings I slipped over the t-post , I think they were 1-1/4" and I slipped the 1" inside of it.

I have seen pics of old water hose cut in pieces and then slit down one side so it can be forced over the PVC to hold the cover in place. I also think this lady's method of tieing them down looks promising. https://homeplaceearth.wordpress.com/category/season-extension/

My garden hoops are 1/2 inch EMT and are 10 feet long and bent into an arch four feet across the bottom. I push each side of the EMT into the ground so my 10 foot width row cover has extra width on each side. I have attached my row cover two different ways, but this is my favorite to use and I can do it alone. I have "snap clamp fittings" which are sold in small quantities at Johnny's, but I bought a larger quantity from globalindustrial.com

http://www.globalindustrial.com/p/storage/fittings-framing-rail/plastic-pipe-fittings/snap-clamp-fittings-3l-12dia-furniture-grade-abs-white

The clamps will hold the row cover in place and there are several ways to secure the ends. You can pleat the end of the row cover into one hand and tie a cord around it at ground level and place something heavy on that "wad" you have just created.

My row cover is Agribon 19, and it has a brand marker down the center of the 10 foot width. I can put it in place at the top of the first arch, clamp it with a snap clamp, then clamp on the side and the bottom using about 5 clamps on this first end piece, then continue to stretch and add clamps down the length of the bed.

Even if you don't have clamps, I think you will be surprised how it stays in place if you stretch it tightly over hoops and don't allow any wind to blow up under the row cover. You can make a small trench and put the edges of the cover down in it and re-fill with the soil if you are doing it for long term. We had an F1 tornado which took a large tree down in my yard and a neighbor's roof off and it didn't remove my row cover. It flipped a tomato cage over onto it and made a small hole, but it didn't even loosen the cover.

I am sold on using EMT because it is strong enough to support additional coverings if you need to throw a blanket over the top in the event of really cold weather. EMT is cheap and easily available at the big box stores. You need some type of bender. I bought mine, but you could also make one with plywood and blocks of wood. Chanda made his so there is probably still a picture out on the Forum somewhere. I, like Dawn, also bought a 500 foot roll of row cover. I mostly use in for a season extender in Spring and Fall, but for certain kinds of squash, I may leave it long term to give the plants a fighting chance before the bugs hit.

I grew up about 30 miles from where Dawn now lives and I know she deals with a lot more high wind than I do at my house near Grove, and I also lived in Norman, and worked at Tinker, so I do understand the Oklahoma wind problem. Everything has to be very secure.

Wow, thank you so much! I guess the new forum doesn't send you an email when somebody responds to your post, so I was pleasantly surprised when I dropped in tonight to see the wealth of shared information. Dawn, I am sooo glad you shared all of that information about row cover trapping heat and cooking plants in our climate. I did not realize that that could happen, so it certainly changes things for me. My plan is to build a sort of three-sided bottomless box out of 2"x12" lumber to set on top of my raised beds (some of them) that is open on the side that faces south. I'm hoping this will break the wind and help plants survive better even when they aren't covered, while allowing them to take advantage of the sunlight from the south. I've experimented some with greens in the winter, and had pretty good luck with at least some of them surviving all winter most years. Like you, I had the best luck with spinach. And when I did have damage to plants or lost plants it was usually really cold and it seemed that the cold winds did more harm than the actual temperature. Anyway, my plan is to then make a flat lid that can sit inside this framework at a slant, with row cover in place of the glass or plastic, to create a coldframe of sorts, but I want the lid to be very easy to remove or at least crack open. I had thought that by using row cover in place of plastic I wouldn't have to worry about it overheating in there, so I am very glad you saved me from that one! Sounds like I need to plan on keeping the lids off most of the time and only add them when it gets really cold and stays cold. Also, it sounds like I will need a couple of different thicknesses for different situations, so thank you also for that. I'm leaning towards the heavier stuff since I won't be leaving it on during the day very often anyway, only during the coldest spells.

Thanks again!

Shelley

Shelley, You're welcome.

There's a couple of things I forgot to mention, so here they are:

When they say that a row cover of a certain weight gives a certain number of degrees of protection, those numbers are not engraved in stone. The relative humidity and wind speed can affect how well the row covers do or don't work. If in doubt. always add an extra layer. Better to be safe than sorry and no one wants to uncover plants and find they froze anyway.

When we are talking about official temperatures, they mean little unless your county's official Mesonet station is in your garden. I'd suggest putting your own thermometer somewhere close to your garden and keeping track of your own temperatures so you'll understand how your temperatures compare to your forecast. I was shocked to learn how much variation there is......and I never would have realized it if I hadn't started tracking my own temperatures. My overnight low rarely is exactly the same as what is forecast for my point forecast and that is fine as long as I understand to expect temperatures lower than forecast.

Understand that temperature forecasts are best estimates and your actual temperature occasionally could vary a great deal. The factor that drove me to buy row covers to begin with was a night when our forecast overnight low temperature was for 50 degrees in very early May one year and we dropped to 32 degrees. I had tomato plants waist high loaded with fruit and pepper plants almost as big. Everything but 4-6 tomato plants at the highest elevation of the garden froze completely back to the ground. I still have no words to describe how sick I felt when I ran outside into the frosty yard and saw my frosted, freeze-killed, burned, blackened garden. It was such a horrible shock. That was my wake-up call to never, ever trust the forecast. Now, I consider what the forecast says, but I also watch my conditions and figure out if I feel like plants need to be covered. Once you understand your micro-climate, you'll know when to cover plants and when not to. Until then, there's a lot of guesswork involved. I try to always err on the side of safety.

Official temperatures are recorded at 5' above grade level, so while the OKMesonet (or you) might record 33 degrees at 5' above the grade level of the soil, the air temperature at grade level might be a degree or two cooler. Keep that in mind as you track your temperatures. I do keep my thermometers posted in the shade at 5' above grade level so that I can see how our temperatures at that level compare to officially recorded temperatures in our area. I always expect the plants in the garden will be a degree or two colder than my thermometer shows.

I feel like row covers are better than cold frames in some ways, but I think there is room in a garden for both. My favorite kinds of cold frames are the very deep ones that have a layer of fresh manure on the bottom because the fresh manure itself is the heat source as it decomposes. With a compact potager like yours, you want to use every kind of season extender you can in order to keep the garden in production as close to year-round as possible so you get maximum production from your garden space. Expect that there will be times when row covers let you down and there will be times when you cover up plants only to find that the temperatures didn't drop as expected and you will feel like you wasted your time. That's always going to happen because we never know what our weather will do.

Okiedawn and others, thank you for your detailed and informative post about the row covers. I have made and installed my hoops and now am deciding about the covers. I will proceed with my decision with much more useful information after reading this. Have a blessed day.

I read almost every bit of this , very interesting.

But I still have a question. I have 7' width Agribon 19. How long should I make my PVC hoops ?

You have to tailor the hoops to the width of your bed, so it takes a bit of experimenting. I can make taller hoops for 3' wide beds than I can for 4' beds, all other things being equal. It also depends on what you'll be growing in the beds. If I am growing taller plants, like brussels sprouts for example, I use 10' or 12' wide row covers in order to ensure my low tunnels always will be taller than the plants. If I'm growing something like winter greens that stay fairly short, I can use 8' wide row covers. Honestly, I only buy the 10' or 12' wide stuff nowadays because that is the width I need to get the height I need over 4' or wider raised beds. I still have a small portion of narrower row cover, but those lesser widths are phasing themselves out of my garden as they age out and shred and decay. Most of the row covers I use have lasted for many more years than they were expected to last, so I cannot complain about them. I was such a rookie at using row cover when I first bought it that I bought the 3' wide stuff because I was only worried then about covering tiny seedlings, so width mattered to me but I ignored height. I quickly learned that tiny seedlings don't stay tiny long and can get pretty tall pretty quickly even when the weather still is quite cold, so quickly upgraded to 6' wide row covers so I could cover up the plants longer in spring since we have persistently cold nights deep into springtime some years.

You can cut a rope or piece of twine to a 7' length and hold it over your bed, experimenting how much height you can get out of it with the width of whatever bed or row you're covering. That will guide you in figuring out how tall you can make your hoops.

I asked the wrong question. More specific would be how much of an " apron " is needed along the sides ? I'm thinking a foot on each side would provide enough to anchor it down. Then I use 5' hoops. But if I could get by with 6" on each side, that means I could use 6 foot hoops .