Scorched Sprouts

The Tucson summer sun taught me an important lesson, that while the air temperature may be appropriate for gardening, seedlings left unprotected from the desert sun will end up burned to a crisp.  Even those seedlings of a heat tolerant vegetable such as cucumbers.

So before I go ahead with the reattempt on getting some cucumbers going in the garden I will need to put up some kind of sun shade to protect the emerging plants.
I found some of that green shade cloth you see around town at The Home Depot that wasn't overly expensive, that I think will do the job nicely.  In the same section I found some metal strips which can be used to mount the cloth to wood, and I intend to use these to attach the shade cloth directly to the fence surrounding the garden.


Here is the work in progress.  I definitely recommend a day when the wind is not blowing otherwise getting these attached would have been a chore indeed.






In the end it was a very quick, painless set-up which took me well under thirty minutes.
Here is the end result, the recently watered area at right is where the cucumber patch is situated.

Now that the cucumber patch is receiving some much needed shade from the afternoon sun hopefully I can get some plants started.  Just to be on the safe side I went ahead and planted more cucumber seeds in case the first batch previously received too much heat to germinate.
Now only time will tell if there will be cucumbers in the fall to allow me to continue on as a picklesmith.