You are much farther ahead than those of us farther North. We still have snow on the ground. [envious!]

I have been able to get something similar to work. Instead of using sections of hose, I used sections of PVC to make clips. I don't recall the thickness of the PVC, but I had to cut a lengthwise section out of them since they are not very flexible. Yes, this was a pain to do with a hacksaw and vise to hold them in place, but they worked fairly well and only occasionally popped off. I have heard people using black poly pipe as well, and that will be more flexible. If you want them to stay on fairly permanently, you could use one of these clips and drill through the clip and PVC and secure with a bolt and wing nut.

We tried using PVC pipe one size larger (the black flexible kind), but that didn't work for us either. I think that if I released some of the tension on the fabric it would work, but I wanted the tension to help snow slide off. Interesting that it worked in your application --- there are a lot of websites that also seem to swear by these PVC clips, which is why we tried them.

I put up a hoop house this fall. I found the best clips for me were PVC of the same size as my hoops. I took a 5 foot section of pipe and ran it through the table saw, turned it a little and ran it through again thus making a channel. I ran a piece of course sandpaper along the cut edges very briefly just to know down sharp burrs and cut it into sections about 2" long. Longer pieces were too hard for me to spread enough to clip onto the hoops. It is a tight fit and is working beautifully. If the clips are too tight it tears the poly a bit if you have to reposition them.

Your method is what we tried first, and it failed miserably. However, that might be because Mark had got the more expensive "hot/cold" pipes, which seem to be made of a less flexible material.

That said, I ended up liking my method better of just using rebar and bricks to keep the whole bottom of the quick hoop solidly on the ground.