Gardens can be very pleasing and relaxing places outside our house, but they require a lot of maintenance. After all, a garden is full of living plants and the birds and insects they attract.
You need keep the garden free of weeds, dried leaves and even protect your plants from damage due to excessive sunlight or other attacks.
A garden shade cloth can be a blessing in disguise for your garden in more ways that you would imagine.
What is Garden Shade Cloth
It is nothing but a thick cloth used to provide shade in the garden.
Typically these are very useful in gardens where you do not have a lot of tall trees for natural shade or in greenhouse kind of gardens where you want to protect the delicate and tender plants from the hot rays of the sun.
Buy Shade Cloth
There are a couple of things to look for in the garden cloth.
The quality of the material
It must be tough enough to withstand the hard outdoors and at the same time provide good shade wherever required.
The Look
Secondly, it must not standout in the garden as an oddity. It needs to blend into the garden too. Else you end up spoiling your garden’s look to protect the very plants that are supposed to beautify it.
In regions where the sunlight is intense, there are chances of UV exposure too. In such places it is better to go for a shade cloth that is UV stabilized for that additional protection.
There are different shade cloth materials available in the market.
The black shade cloth is commonly used to filter out the UV rays. The other alternative is the alumitex shade cloth. In this cloth, the threads are aluminum. These threads can reflect excessive heat out during summer months and retain warmth during winter season.
The Uses
Other than to retain excessive heat out during summer and retain warmth during winter,but with some creativity you can put your shade cloth to other uses too.
As stated earlier, gardens are tough to maintain. If you have a messy garden, like having garbage cans or gardening tools kept in one corner, you can cover them with a shade cloth.
Of course just covering them will make it more obvious and not serve the purpose. A good solution to this problem is to create a stand for the garden cloth and affix the cloth to the stand.
Now you just have to place the stand in one corner of the garden and hide all your shabby stuff behind that shade.
If you want to push this idea a bit further, you can use patterned shade cloth so it looks more aesthetic. Alternatively, you can even paint your own stuff on that.
And lastly, the shade cloth still provides shade, so you can exploit its shade to protect some of your plants too. As it is seen, a little more creativity on your part can transform something like a shade cloth into an artistic addition to your garden.
In conclusion, the garden shade cloth is probably the most inexpensive way of protecting your garden. It can also be used to add some artistic value to your garden, not just in shades, colors and patterns, but also in hiding some of the unwanted junk away from on lookers eyes.
