I’m looking into building a hoop house. My question is, if I place my pots with persimmon, pawpaw, peach and such directly on the ground in the hoop house will the roots freeze?
Looking for some first hand experience.
I’m tired of burying all the younger pots every year.
Thanks everyone
I have a tiny (6’x3’) 4’ high tunnel loosely covered in plastic that I use to give extra heat to a fig in the summer, overwinter pots and start seedlings. It’s just made of some thin steel row cover hoops stuck in wood, but I find it gives an extra zone of protection in the winter and is enough for large potted seedlings. In the winter I stick three more hoops in the ground and use a double layer of row cover over everything. So far it’s worked to overwinter an in ground camellia sinensis seedling and a bunch of potted tree seedlings (including pawpaws). There’s also 1 year old potted southern magnolia in there this year that looks completely untouched by winter so far. In the middle of winter the pots do freeze, but I don’t think all the way through and it doesn’t seem to damage them. Sometimes the ground gets a crust of frost, but never more than an inch thick.
Edit to add: I’ve also done the same thing under a single layer of row cover by grouping the pots together and burying them half way in the ground, which works too.
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When you say row cover what are you referring to ?
It’s a light woven cloth that farmers use to protect plants from frost:
And this is the kind hoop I used:
One of my covered beds:
It’s a bit messy after winter, but that’s the idea
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I’m not sure any of us can really answer this. You would need to test the temperature under the cover and compare it to ambient on a night with radiational cooling (clear and calm). Different materials will hold in different amounts of heat. The more longwave/infrared rad it lets pass through the colder it will be underneath.
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