This is a brief recap on my experiences using burlap rolls or jute, a very fine mesh fabric material, all natural, biodegradable, and used often.
It's in all kinds of applications as one of the more rustic and of all the things that have become plastic and synthetic, it's one of the few remaining vestiges of the past, of a time where it was ubiquitous for many forms of bags and all kinds of different uses.
But I'm very glad that it survived and is still in a scale to where it's affordable to access.
So what I have used it for very extensively in the garden is for spot treating kind of shade cloth.
I’ve been getting rolls to drape over nursery trays and micro green trays so that they're providing a bit of shade, they're keeping the moisture in there.
Say, it's a dense plant in a tray. And sort I've learned that ideally, if I can get away with it, I wanna lay those seeds in and keep them moist, but not cover them in another layer of the growing medium, whatever kind of growing medium, soil or cocoa core, whatever it is, compost, whatever it is.
I would prefer that those micro greens don't come up and sprout and have a bunch of that growing medium still all over so in order to get them to have to be free of that, a burlap shade cloth roll over the top of that tray, it's light enough to where as the seeds come up, certainly, if they're planted very densely with the micro greens, they're gonna easily lift up that.
And by the time they're lifting it up, they're not gonna need that shade, necessarily.
But the idea that, whereas you would normally have to protect seeds from drying out and from direct sunlight, you would have to give them some soil to keep them moist and but if that burlap roll can do that, perform that function, then you get the added benefit that those micro greens as they sprout, they're not carrying a lot of debris with them from the growing medium.
So I've had great success, and I love the idea that it can protect them from wind, and acts as a wind barrier that sort of allows wind gusts to just roll right over whatever has been planted and I've used it not only for micro greens and for seedling trays and pots and whatnot four inch pots those little starter pots.
But also using that as a shade canopy, putting it up on sticks in the garden, where, as plants grow, you can just hoist it up very easily.
And if you have fencing, let's say, an outer perimeter garden fence, just draping that down with sticks going down at an angle so that it doesn't just drop right on the plant.
Wanna always have a lot of those burlap rolls to help establish micro greens or seedlings or as things get planted out, to be able to scale it up and hoist it up.
So this is my PSA for myself. I never have to go back and rely on any kind of synthetic or plastic or nontoxic, non biodegradable means of shading and protection.
It's so versatile, it's so and it's beautiful too. Aesthetically, it checks that box for me too.
I can very much enjoy the aesthetic of burlap rolls all over the place.
It's like a natural kind of gauze so if a nursery you think of it like an incubator or a part of a hospital it's like, the nursery part of a hospital or is this medical application at a scale of banaging the soil.
Remediating the soil and establishing the plants that are going to add nutrients to the soil, e.g., planting, legumes that are nitrogen fixing.
You're actually bandaging and building and repairing the soil by doing that, or planting Daikon Radish to break up compacted soil.
So quite literally, you're caring for the nursery plants, giving them that protective blanket and allowing the earth to heal.
So it's good, both in the form of protecting the new plantings. And it's also good when you're watering those new plants, you're preventing erosion.
It's like a retractable mulch layer. Again, I can't say enough how thrilled I am with it.
And I least love the idea that it's like a garden gauze as much to heal wounds on the land, soil, to heal those, just be a security blanket protective blanket for those seedlings coming up so again as the psa, I hope you enjoy burlap in your life.