Protect Your Crops in Hot Weather Cheaply

What is a few challenges with cool season crops? Is that sometimes you need to get them in the ground while it's still hot. Today's we are going to talk to you about some tips that you can do to keep those cool season crops cool, even when it's hot, and its cheap too.

Now once the mulch is down and it's watered in that's another important step to get that soil good and moist. Then you need to cover up your plans to provide a light amount of shade. There's a couple ways that you can do that and really low-tech way is to use what's called floating row cover. This is just a spun bound. Nylon. It's sometimes it's called remay, but what's nice about this it lets the air circulate right through it plus water can get through and of course plenty of sunlight but it still provides a small amount of shade. 

That's really what you're after here. But the bonus of using this kind of material draped over the top of your blanket. It also serves as a physical barrier from some of those pest insects namely those cabbage moths that are flying overhead that love to lay their eggs on leafy crops dozen eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat. Eat those leaves. 

This is great for that because this is what you would use for that insect protection. You just drink this over-the-top, you can buy this online or garden centers and the size that you need and just lay it over the top and Anchor It Down. Well, the benefit of the road cover is really nice because it does block the pest insects. It only provides a marginal amount of shade protection. 

The method of choice that we really like is actual shade cloth and that's what you look for when you go to a garden center or you look online. You're looking for shade cloth. It's a nylon mesh. It comes in different waves depending on how much shade you want to provide that it's inexpensive and it lasts a really long time. You get this based on the size that you need to cover the area to protect your plants. But before you do this because this is too heavy to just lay right on your plants you need to support this and the way that You should do that is just with some inexpensive PVC pipe that you can get at any box store. 

A 10-foot length of pipe is less than three dollars and it cuts easily with a hacksaw and everybody's got a hacksaw. All right, just cut it down to the length that you think you need and it's very flexible. And then you just put it into the ground over the area that you want to protect and with good soil. 

By the way, it goes in really easily and you just push it down as far as you need to that's about right. And it's about even with the other three and you only need about three here and then you just drape this over the top and then you'll want to clip it down. The shake off I bought these beds are 12 feet long. 

The cloths wider than the width of the bed. So we have a little bit of extra overlap, which is nice, but then you just pull it across the hoops and you can do this by yourself, but if you have helped that's good, too. 

And then you just get some plastic clamps. Just get these at the Box Store to they're very inexpensive and they last a long time but position the shade cloth over the hoops. So it's fully covering from front to back and side to side and then just clip it in place. I like to start with the middle. It's centered and then go to the other side and do the same thing. 

And that really sets it up and then it's just a matter of securing the sides. 

The top two not necessary, but it doesn't hurt. 

And that took what all of two minutes to do that but the beauty of this is it's not going to block all the sunlight but it does provide a certain amount of shade usually blocks about 70% of the direct sunlight and that makes a big difference to these young plants that are trying to get settled in. They don't need all that extra heat and neither done, but it is it's like 90-something degrees out here in the middle of September. So certainly you need to do something to get these plants well on their way, so anything that you can do to help is going to make a big difference and so my method of choice, 

Is this inexpensive shade cloth? It's well worth the investment and the investment isn't that much anyway 

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