Making Your Own Plant Shade

By now, I imagine most of you have gone outside and gotten your garden ready for a plentiful harvest. I wanted to share with you a new trick that I incorporated into my garden this year to help my plants. 

If you follow my blog, you may remember that I live in the high desert, where the sunshine can be brutal to young veggie plants. My parents, who are also gardeners, have a fabulous idea on how to combat the harsh sun. My dad made little shade stands for my mom's garden out of various bits and pieces he had laying around. I thought this was a great idea and wanted to incorporate it into my garden. Since KB and I move so much, we don't have a lot of "extras" laying around the house for future use...like you do when you've lived on the same land for over 25 years (ahem! my parents).

After years of thinking about it, I finally decided how I could make shade stands for myself. So if you need to make some shade for your baby plants, here's how I did it:

Materials to Make One Plant Shade:

• 2 wooden stakes 
• 3 ft shade material (my store had it available on a roll so you could just get the amount you needed)
• staples and staple gun
• mallet to get them in the garden

I purchased my supplies at Ace, because that's the main hardware store in my small town. You can find these at any hardware/home improvement stores. 

How to Make it:
Step 1: Measure out your material for the amount of shade you need and cut to that size. I did 25" wide by 14" high.

Step 2: Wrap the material around the stake and staple it on both sides, this will provide extra stability to your shade. Staple the entire length of the fabric. Do this on both sides.

Step 3: Wrap the shade fabric around the stakes as needed for adjustability. On two of mine, I wrapped it around twice but on one of mine, to get the right angle, I only wrapped it once. 

Step 4: Use your mallet to pound them into the ground. You may have to play with them; it took me a few tries after watching how the sun moved across the bed to get them angled the right way to provide shade during the heat of the day. 

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As a bonus, I wanted to share with you my garden art post. This was created out of necessity, to prop up a falling down fence. It was a temporary fix that turned into a more permanent one. I wanted to make it pretty so I painted it to create a garden art post. 

Linked up with: Homestead Barn Hop, Frugal Crafty Home, From the Farm