When the weather went from below-normal-cold strait to 30C we encountered a big row cover problem. We needed to switch out our frost-protecting row covers for breatheable nets. The problem? We used all of them! And bad planning on my part…I had half-rows of brassicas that need to be covered for flea beetles that I should have combined into one bed.
So musical row and net covers it was, but we needed more. Ordering them would mean at least a week in shipping.
But aha, I had some shade cloth I ordered last year! That netting should maybe be good for flea beetles. So we rolled it out, all pumped that we could cover another 3 beds with the saving-grace shade cloth.
But no! I ordered the wrong shade cloth! It was too short! Coming in at just 36″ it would not be able to be anchored over a 30″ bed, nevermind stretched over hoops. It only took a year to figure out this mistake!
So we racked our brains figuring out how we can MacGyver this, but to no obvious avail. Building some thing to stretch out this shade cloth and keep it anchored would be cumbersome, annoying, and time consuming.
But then! I realized we did have a solution….we had ordered a product a couple years ago to try it out – the Neversink LowCat Tunnel Hoop Kit – a row cover hoop design that does not require anchor weights and instead uses a sort of bungee rope to hold down the fabric, which would allow us to use a too-narrow fabric.
Bonus? The bonus is that we had a perfect use case: our spinach, baking and probably-soon-to-be-bolting away in the 30C+ sun.
The open side, is the north side, the closed side is the south side.
A bonus is we don’t have to hike up the cover to weed it, or harvest.
And it appears to be working…that spinach has doubled in size since installing the shade cloth.
So don’t despair if it appears like you’ve got a big L on your hands. It turns out that not only was this a solution, but this is working so good I’m considering buying two more tunnel kits to use indefinitely shading spinach, lettuce, arugula, any greens that would benefit from staying out of a punishing summer high pressure ridge bringing us 30C+ weather.
Maybe our greens are about to take a big step up!
These things are fairly easy to install which lowers the friction for us to use them or move them around. So the plan for this year will be to keep moving thing around the bed system and seeing how it works out.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
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