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Advice sought- row cover structures (long.hopefully not too

I am new to gardening, and my row cover experiment was rather a disaster
this year. I am wondering if anyone has tried anything similar to what I
will describe below, but had more success with it. I wanted to cover some
vining gourds and vining zucchinni. These plants can have vines 20 ft
long! Because the gourds won't grow straight if left on the ground, I
trained  2 rows of them on  short trellises (3 ft. wire fence). Then 
 I built a trapezoidal cylindrical frame about 25
ft. long out of PVC pipe, anchored with rebar (I don't have graphics here,
but for anyone who doesn't know what a trapezoidal cylinder looks like,
the cross-section of the frame looks like a trapezoid, something like
this, if I could only raise that middle line segment higher: /-\),which
enclosed the fences. The frame is about 4 ft. high and 10 ft. wide at the
bottom.
Oh, before I continue, you might ask why I didn't just lay the cover on
top of the plants! My limited experience of the previous year is that
these vining plants don't like the cover directly on top of them. They
grew some, but only really took off when I took the covers off (like
practically the very next day-these things can really grow under the right
conditions!).Unfortunately, once the cover was off, the pickleworms ate
all the zucchinni, mostly before it could even flower, and the stilt bugs
did the same to the gourds.Also,the gourd plants are so strong, they poke
holes in the cover, given the slightest pressure on them.
To continue...I then covered the frame with chicken wire (actually, my
first experiment didn't use the wire,but the covers then easily tore in
the wind),draped from side to side; now it looks something like a Quonset
hut (semicylindrical).This was then covered with the row covers, which I
had sewn together.Whew!
Unfortunately, this isn't working! I have gone thru 3 sets of row covers
(today was the last straw- I removed the remains!).After the first
experiment failed, I also tied strips of cloth to bricks and put these
across the structure from side-to-side, so that the cloth wouldn't flap
around so much when the wind picked up. This still left plenty of
"give",tho. Yet 2 more times I've gone out after the wind has picked up
a bit and found huge gaping holes in the cloths.
So I've scrapped this design. Does anyone have any ideas for what might
work? Oh, in another area I built smaller strucures, about 3 ft. high, 2
1/2 ft wide, 4 ft long, with the wire just supported underneath by a
couple of wooden stakes, and in a more sheltered area. These lasted
longer,but still the covers were in shreds by July. All of these covers (2
different companies) were supposed to last 1-2 seasons.
Thanks for any thoughts on the subject!
Peg
daniemm@mail.auburn.edu 


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