As the warm weather sets in, I thought I’d share our method of keeping our plants shaded in the vegetable garden. Several years ago we bought some large, inexpensive metal canopy tents and installed them over our garden beds. Instead of putting on the tarp covers that came with the tents, we bought some shade cloth and use that instead. We use a couple of ropes at the ends of the cloths to help pull them over the top of the metal frame and attach the cloths with small bungee balls. It takes about 15 minutes to put up the shade cloth on each tent and we leave them there all summer (either over the tent if it’s hot or rolled up along the horizontal bars if it’s cool or cloudy). The metal frames are up all year and without any covering, they withstand the winter snow and wind without any problems. We’ve found it to be an affordable and effective way to keep our plants cool.
4 Likes