Homemade Cloche Conduit Plumbing

Cloche

• A cloche consists of a small, semicircular, clear covering that fits over plants like a small dome or tunnel. When gardening, you place a cloche over a small group of plants. The clear plastic covering allows heat to enter and traps it, providing warmth for plants during the winter. Various types of cloches exist, including hard cloches, or those with a solid covering, and flexible cloches made from plastic sheeting. A conduit cloche consists of a clear plastic sheet draped over a series of semicircular conduits driven into the ground. These cloches assume a long, tunnel-like shape.

Homemade Conduit Cloche

• You need two things to make a conduit cloche: plastic sheeting and conduits. The authors of the book “The Organic Salad Garden” recommend using polythene sheeting or film as a cover. Use either plastic or metal electrical conduits to create the form of the cloche. Steve Solomon, author of the book “Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades,” recommends purchasing 10-foot-long pieces of ½ inch galvanized thinwall conduits from an electrical supply store and turning them into hoops with a pipe bender. Drive the conduit hoops into the earth around your plants and place the plastic over the hoops to build the cloche. Bury the ends of the plastic in soil to ensure the cover doesn't blow away.

Cloche Plumbing

• A cloche only needs plumbing for one reason: irrigation. Irrigation consists of the method or methods by which plants receive water. However, you should avoid watering plants in cold weather because this time of year comprises a period of dormancy for plants. Plants only need water in the spring, summer and fall, during which times you remove a cloche to allow plants to grow. If, for some reason, you must irrigate a cloche, you can make a homemade irrigation system by drilling holes in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes and hooking them up to a hose or water pump. Bury the pipes in the soil around your plants so the water penetrates to the roots.

More on Cloches

• Using conduits to build a cloche serves a double purpose. In addition to providing a support structure for the plastic sheeting of the unit, a conduit conducts heat from sunlight into the soil around plants. In doing this, a conduit helps keep plant roots warm and prevents freezing. Always remove the plastic from a cloche as weather gets warm – in strong sunlight, the interior of a cloche gets hot and can suffocate and wilt plants.

Terminology

• Some experts, such as the authors of “The Organic Salad Garden,” differentiate cloches from tunnels. In this naming system, a conduit cloche, which assumes a tunnel shape, qualifies technically as a tunnel, not a cloche. Keep this in mind when researching or building a cloche, to avoid confusion. As a structure, cloches also look exactly like polyhouses. However, polyhouses are large enough for gardeners to enter, while cloches usually stand no more than three feet tall.