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

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. In this blog post, I’ll show you how!

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frequently Asked Questions about Row Covers

1. 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 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 fewer 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.

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, so use the one you feel most comfortable with.

Related: The Best Deterrents to Keep Pesky Birds Away from Plants

2. 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 it 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 it with landscape staples or binder clips at each side.

3. Which 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, Brussels sprouts, and the like.

We also have very aggressive birds at our house in the city, so we cover the vegetables and plants 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.

4. Can row covers protect vegetables from wind?

In short, yes. But there are 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. They work well, and as long as they are secured with binder clips and bricks, they generally stay put.

Hardening off plants is hard. I’ve found that using a floating row cover for a week after planting in the garden really helps reduce plant shock and the number of plants that die. However, in our acreage garden, the wind will rip the landscape staples out of the ground, and the row cover ends up on one side of the hoops.

Thankfully the hoop house 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.

5. 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.

Related: 6 Organic Ways to Keep Bugs Out of Broccoli

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NEED MORE HELP IN THE GARDEN?

Green thumbs aren’t just given out at birth. They’re a combination of learning about gardening and trial and error. If you wish you knew more about gardening and had more confidence in your abilities, you need the Growing Roots Gardening Guide. 

It’s an e-book plus 6 bonuses. Everything you need to go from complete garden newb to confident gardener in one growing season. Get all the details of what’s inside here. 

Happy gardening!