Jute Burlap Fabric For Desert Food Forest Garden Shade and Wind Breaks TPS-0139

Giving an update on the survival gardening out in the desert.

It's getting quite a bit hotter during the day, still a bit of coolness in the morning, the plants that I have growing in some galvanized can container gardens inside of a hardware cloth covered jungle gym dome I call the Bonsai Food Forest.

The plants are doing very well as it's gotten a bit warmer, and it's actually the best performance that I've had within those cans in a few years, about three years of experimenting with this system, which is very micro scale.

I decided to give up on covering, shading the whole dome from the top by placing either a canvas drop cloth, or what later became a combination of that and burlap, otherwise known as jute, which is what you would see, used to wrap tree root balls, sometimes used for sandbagging, and often use for produce.

There are different grains of it. It's a mesh of a plant, woven material from the jute plant, which I'd like to grow at some point.

I'm glad that it's natural, biodegradable, and it's probably my favorite material next to the canvas drop cloths for being used as an all natural alternative to plastic or petroleum based shade cloth, which is a lot of what's on the market.

It's a trade off, of course, that is not gonna last as long, but I'd much rather have extra burlap on a roll, like a roll of fabric and when it deteriorates it just becomes nontoxic compost.

Also as it breaks into smaller pieces, it can be used for different applications.

I had taken the semi shredded burlap off the top of the dome that was providing a function of shade, but it kept getting just tore up in the wind.

So I took the smaller pieces of it and just decided to sort of spot treat the cans and just place the burlap directly over the seedlings in the cans, having had the experience that it's light enough to where, as those seedlings come up, if they're planted densely enough, the way that you would be planting in food forest gardening, or even just micro greens, there's enough density of plantings that there's an emergent property.

Collectively, the seedlings are able to push up even, through course grain mulch if they're under mulch, it's surprising how powerful it can be that they work together.

They're able to pretty evenly, for the most part, grow under the shade of that burlap cloth, and then push it up gently so that it's not constrained to them.

Some of them might even grow through it, which is something to watch out for, to make sure they don't get caught up so you're not pulling them out of the soil if you need to remove the cloth.

So my pattern has been very, very satisfying with the effect of it, that's really been a game changer.

For one, it is a more direct spot treatment of the shade, so you eliminate the risk of the shade only covering it for a certain part of the day.

As the seasons change, the sun angle changes, you may not get the same coverage.

So for them to be draped directly over the cans, they're giving 100% guaranteed shade coverage.

And if I ever needed to double them up, or use different mesh, I could adjust that as needed as well.

I could even raise them up if I wanted to put them on sticks, which I've done before, make little tents with sticks.

That's probably what will happen at the next level as plants get to a point where some of them are growing faster than others, and there's more of that diverse, multi layered, multi micro, sort of micro canopy going on.

Here's the other trade off though. Another reason why it's so beneficial right now, is that one piece laying over the can is creating a perfect wind block.

Whereas every other piece of fabric that's out on my site, which I use it for a number of things to just protect a lot of different things, that fabric will be flying all over the place.

Whereas just this draped square of burlap material over the cans, it holds its shape, and the wind just goes right over it doesn't even move it almost at all unless there's a point where it's able to get beneath it, but if I need to weigh it down with a couple of rocks, that even works too.

But I almost haven't needed to weigh them down, except for the worst storms.

But the fact that the burlap laid across the seedlings protects them from being beaten up by the wind, that keeps the moisture in.

There's something called desiccation. That is what happens when wind, just the effect of wind blowing across plants, that draws the moisture out of them, makes them wither and die, not to mention just the abuse of them being battered by the force of the wind individually, not really doing that much to wind block each other.

But this amazing effect, it's really been amazing to observe.

I got some photos and footage of it, but just something as simple as laying that burlap across it, planting dense enough and letting it drape over gently.

Each time I will remove it so I can spot treat with watering, and make sure I'm not letting anything dry out underneath.

I'll remove it to water, put it back on gently, and make sure I'm not crushing anything, and make sure everything was given a little bit of bagginess where I need to.

The wind just goes right over. It does not damage the plants. So that's why they're doing so much better than they ever have.

I'm really thrilled about it, because the storms, they kick up a lot of sand, stuff gets covered in sand, they get beaten by the wind, they get dried out by the wind, and if the shade on the top of the dome isn't working properly then they get dried out by the sun.

It matches the color of the desert so is also a kind of camo. This is obviously an old school tactic, not probably gonna hold up as much to all the different kinds of technology they have now for scanning, even in different spectrums of light, though to the eye, it looks like that you'd barely see from a distance that there's greens going in there. You get closer, and you see the greens.

But it's amazing how effective it is. It's totally changed the game for me.

It takes away one thing, which is, I like to watch the garden grow. It's an aesthetic value to be able to see it, but I'll trade that for the survival and the resilience of it.

Finding ways to make permaculture work in a very barren, dry, harsh, dangerous environment, which is what this desert is.

So if I can get this pattern to extend, and I can scale it all the way to the whole the jute rolls is what they're called landscaping.

It's almost like a weed landscaping fabric material. You use it to secure mulch on a slope, or use it to prevent erosion.

I've done a lot of work with that, so I'm excited to continue with this pattern.

Hopefully I'll find, as I grow and scale all be looking into the supply chain and the fair trade aspects of it.

For now, it's just whatever is on the shelf, but I'd like to get more dialed in with that so that I know where it's coming from.

I know it's growing sustainably until I could eventually grow it myself, or something similar.

But definitely my PSA on this is that if you can avoid anything synthetic, and you can accept the trade off that it's biodegradable, which means it biodegrades, so you gotta use a little bit extra of it.

It may be more expensive, that's a trade off as well.

If you were clever, you could source this from the waste stream and get it for free. Do someone a favor by managing the flow of it from whatever system that they're using it in. I'm sure a lot of it goes into the landfill.

I hope it works for you.