This summer as well I’ve been shading the vegetable garden to minimize water evaporation and to avoid sunburned tomatoes. Beginning of August I decided to finally try professional shade netting instead of the white frost protection fleece that is neither long-lived nor inexpensive.
I invested about €50 in 10 meters of dark green HDPE shade netting with a rate of 56% shade to put over the “greenhouse” hoops. The netting is a bit heavier and stiffer and not quite as pretty to look at, but so far it has proven itself to be far superior in our westerly winds – it hardly moves at all, even in strong gusts. I think I will also devise a way to install this type of netting on the Eastern portion of the vegetable garden, where the beds come up directly to the wall and there the fleece tends to have gaps.
Funnily enough the zucchini plant reacted to the change in light/shade by erupting in powdery mildew spots (easy to treat with regular milkwater spraying) while the Pak Choy and new tomato seedlings seemed to have grown at least an inch in one day.
Leave a Reply