Sunday, July 15, 2012

hoop house seems to be working

We put up the first half of a small hoop house yesterday. It's more like a small garden cover than a high tunnel because the flexible pvc was too flexible at 20 feet long. At 10 feet long, the hoops stay up on there own. I would like to try some longer poles, but not at too much more expense. The roll of 250 ft is almost finished and I am not buying another so may just stick with cutting the 20 ft sections into 10's. I have to figure out the covering because we will need three of these tunnels to sleep all of us. They are tall enough to sit up in but not stand.

Friday, July 13, 2012

I am restarting the blog. Going to use it to keep focus on homeschooling this year and on the house.  This last two weeks we have been working on geodesic dome designs. We are doing a unit on emergency preparedness and camping. We were hoping to building an inexpensive tent for camping...It  hasn't succeeded yet.   I am finding that making do with materials that are cheaper but don't work as well can actually cost you more in the long run.  We also discussed the concept of research and development being expensive, specially when you ideas do not work.  Back to the drawing board.