There are still some areas on the west end of the garden that are pretty unruly. Really the best way I've found to fight the Bermuda grass and weeds is with black plastic and hot sunshine.
I had some black plastic drop cloth that I had bought at Meador's, and some heavier black plastic that was left over from when we built the shop many years ago (it was put down on the ground under the concrete slab to help keep the slab from sweating).
But the plastic I had wasn't able to stand up to the sun. The heavier stuff from the shop actually broke down the worst, and when I tried picking it up to move it, it basically disintegrated in my hands. Not cool. I ended up having to pick up lots of jibbles of plastic and although I tried my best, I know I still didn't get them all.
The stuff from Meador's has done better. It rips when I try to move it if I'm not real careful, but at least doesn't fall apart.
So finally to the point. Since my plastic was falling apart, I thought I might look into buying a used silage tarp. But instead, I found a website that sells used billboard vinyl, billboardtarps.com.
A 10' x 16' size wasn't too terribly expensive and I figured that was probably as big of a tarp as I could handle on my own. And although the shipping actually cost me as much (or maybe slightly more) than the tarp itself, I decided to go ahead and get one.
I told RAF that I hoped the tarp didn't have something offensive on it. LOL
And it didn't. It turned out to be a holiday tarp for some kind of wine.
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| My billboard tarp. |
So although I hated to cover up some of the volunteer zinnias that were growing in the garden just east of the Sorghum Sudan grass row, I just tried not to think too much about it as I unfolded the tarp and pulled it up over the garden.
My first impressions are very good. It's very heavy, so I don't think it will hang on anything and rip. Plus, it's reinforced around the edges, which makes it easy to drag and not worry about ripping the edge.
The vinyl is UV protected, so it should last a long time.
The only real objection I have was the smell. When I unfolded it and dragged it out into the garden, there was a very strong smell of vinyl that I could smell all the way at the other end of the garden. I think any time you smell plastic, that's probably not a good thing, but the smell was pretty much gone after a couple of days.
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| The tarp on the garden. |
The tarp is heavy enough that unlike the plastic, I don't know that it would even blow around if I didn't weigh it down, but just to be sure, I put some t-posts down around the edges in a few places.
And looking at the weather forecast, I'd say I got the tarp put out just in time. It's certainly going to have plenty of sunshine that will absolutely bake anything that's under it.
Unfortunately, that also means that the plants in the yard and garden are going to be baking in the sun too.
I had already started working on protecting things through the intense heat of summer, starting with the strawberry bed. Since the insect netting was no longer needed on the brassica bed (the cabbages have been harvested and the broccoli was a bust) I was able to move those over to the strawberry bed to hold up the shade cloth I bought last summer.
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| Shade cloth protecting the strawberry bed. |
These plastic hoops made from PEX pipe work so much better than the pieces of welded fence wire I tried to use last summer! No matter how careful I tried to be, the shade cloth would always hang on the cut edges of the wire, and I was so afraid I was going to rip it! But these hoops are smooth and all I had to do to fasten the shade cloth to them was use some bread ties to secure the cloth onto the hoops.
My main problem though, isn't the hoops. My main problem is that I only have the one piece of shade cloth.
So again this year I'm using some old bed sheets to try to protect the plants from the intense sun.
I had a little cantaloupe plant that came up volunteer in last year's compost that already has two little melons on it - I definitely didn't want it to die in the heat! So I took the last two PEX hoops and rigged up a little frame to hold a sheet over that.
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| Shading the cantaloupe. |
I thought I could use some of the electrical conduit I had bought to use in the shop to rig up a frame to hold some sheets over the tomatoes, but that idea absolutely did not work. The end of the conduit with the bell on it was just too stiff to bend at a good angle.
So instead, I'm hoping that the application of Kaolin clay that I've put on the tomatoes and the cucumbers in an attempt to protect them from stink bugs and cucumber beetles will help.
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| Kaolin clay sprayed on the cucumbers and tomatoes. |
According to the information online about kaolin clay, it can cool plants by 10° to 15° F. I've not checked on the plants this afternoon to see how they look.
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| Sheet covering the green beans. |
(I need to do a bit of work on this..the hoops are too far apart to really hold the sheet up, and with only two of them I can't cover all of the plants.)
It's a bit sad really that the heat has made it here just as the corn is starting to tassel. I don't know if it will make anything or not, and I really don't have a good way to protect it from the sun.
But based on what I learned last year, shade is the key to getting the plants through this hot part of summer. Even when I was watering things every day, the water wasn't enough to offset the baking sun for hour after hour after hour. And since the temperature isn't going to get down low enough at night to cool things back off, the effect is cumulative. The plants just eventually give up.
Long term I'd like to put up a frame of some sort that can hold a big shade cloth, but as RAF pointed out, we have other much more important things we need to spend money on before I do that. So for now, I'll just have to work with the sheets to see if they can make a difference.
Maybe we'll get lucky and the heat and dry weather won't last as long this summer. But it's going to be brutal while it's here.
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| IBC tank about half full. |