Happy Friday everyone! I hope you are all gearing up for some fun for this long Labor Day weekend. Although I have to admit: our household isn’t getting a long weekend. Justin has to work on Labor Day – bummer! However, we’re still going to attempt to relax and enjoy the weekend anyway! But first, one of the tasks will probably be tending to our garden – I’ve let the weeds grow in a bit in my attempt to stay inside and out of the really hot weather. Now I’m going to pay for it. On a good note: our garden has been doing very well despite the heat of summer. We’ve been protecting the garden with a shade/screen that Justin constructed! What a crafty guy I’ve got…
Last year, we noticed that our plants could not handle the combination of heat, direct sunlight, and rain that we get here in Florida during the summer months. The spot our garden is in is GREAT during the fall, winter, and spring, but summer is a bit of a problem. Justin pondered it for a while; I could tell he was kind of sad that our garden was sitting there, vacant, for a month or so after our spring vegetables were pulled up in the early summer. I can tell when he gets an idea: he begins doing research online, he draws out diagrams, he is ON it. It’s best to let him just go with the idea when he has it, because once he sets his mind on a project, he intends to complete it.
Justin decided we should construct a shade/screen to protect the garden – it would diffuse the direct sunlight so the plants wouldn’t burn and would also prevent the rain from soaking the plants constantly so we can control the amount they are getting. Seemed pretty brilliant to me. So, he ventured to the store and came back with PVC pipe, a roll of plastic sheeting, and some rope. He measured our garden area and got cutting – he created a frame with the PVC pipe, along with support legs to prop it up.
The trickiest part was creating the screen. I was actually quite impressed when he figured out on his own that he could use our iron for this project. To attach the plastic sheeting to the frame, he wanted to create pockets/loops to slide the pipes through. We set our iron on medium heat, then looped the plastic sheeting around the PVC pipe to create the perfect sized “loop.” We placed parchment paper down on top of the plastic sheeting (so it wouldn’t melt onto the iron itself), and carefully ran the iron up and down the length of the sheeting/pipe. Justin also made a few extra small loops to make sure the plastic sheeting was secure in the middle of the structure as well as on the ends (so it wouldn’t flap up/balloon when wind hits it).
After the legs were attached, we stuck our structure over the garden and added a bit of extra security by tying rope around some points and securing them to our garden fence. We set the shade on an angle (angled down at the front edge of our garden) so rain water would run down and off onto the ground in front of the garden instead of pooling inside of our screen and weighing it down. Overall, I think it turned out pretty great!
The proof of our screen/shade’s success is now showing in the garden: the tomatoes and zucchini that would now be either drowned by the rain or burned by excessive sun are now thriving. Hooray for handy husbands, right?
Do you have plans to be productive around the house during Labor Day, or will you be taking advantage of extra relaxation time?
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