Garden Fleece: Protecting Your Plants Through The Winter
 (Read 500+ times)
By Patricia Wainwright
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The weather can be annoyingly fickle and garden fleece can solve a huge problem for the gardener trying to raise seedlings and young plants. Spring can change from light, warm days to a sudden frost at night; vulnerable plants can suffer and all that hard work is for nothing. If you are growing young plants and potting out seedlings into beds, you need to protect them from the vagaries of the climate. A good product to use is garden fleece, which acts as an insulator, for young plants, keeping them and the soil warm.
Using Garden Fleece
Garden fleece is used as protection against wind, frost, hail, insects and birds, for newly planted seedlings, young shrubs and crops. It is insect resistant so reduces the need to use insecticides and the warmth it provides can encourage an early harvest of some crops. It can be doubled up to provide extra shading in greenhouses, or extra protection for very vulnerable plants. Garden fleece is great to use for reseeding lawns as it aids germination and protects against small birds.
Types of garden fleece
Garden fleece is made from weather resistant polyethylene fiber that is permeable, letting in water light and air, and UV stabilized, so it does not break down in sunlight. It is constructed as evenly spaced mesh giving it high-tensile strength so it lasts longer and yet it is light enough not to crush tender young plants. It is available in 17-18g thick fleece or the heavyweight 30g for Alaskan conditions! There is also a 60g version for protecting trees and shrubs. Some garden fleece has a reinforced edge, making it easier to secure to the ground. Garden fleece needs to be pegged at the edges, so that it will not be blown away, and there are pronged pegs for this job. It is reusable as it can be washed at low temperatures using detergent. There is a green version which is heavier, good for shading and/or insulating greenhouses and, being breathable, does not create condensation problems. There are garden fleece jackets that zip up to protect larger frost vulnerable plants. They are a heavyweight 70g to 100g which is expensive. One of the most cost effective ways to protect your plants is to buy garden fleece roll. It comes in various lengths, between 5 feet and 10 feet wide in the different varieties. It can be cut to size, doubled up, and does not fray; garden fleece roll is the cheaper and less wasteful way to buy garden fleece.
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Author Bio Box: Patricia Wainwright
Get all the facts about spring gardening and organic gardening at GreenThumbArticles.com!
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