Freeze Protection Plant Covers
When new gardeners ask me for advice, I always tell them to focus on the basics and minimize all the variables they can. Don’t try to do everything your first year. Start with just a couple of raised beds, buy your compost instead of making it, and pick up some plant starts from a nursery instead of starting them from seed. Being prepared with these covers eliminates one more variable -surprise overnight frosts- that could discourage you from starting early in spring or keeping your garden going well into the fall.
Living in the Midwest, we never know what Mother Nature is going to throw at us. Frost dates can be deceptively cruel because you can do everything right and still get burned by that one errant night when temperatures dip just a little bit lower than expected. You wake up to find your tomatoes and peppers with drooping leaves, and your plants are as good as dead by that evening.
These frost protection covers will buy you a little bit of grace when you have a specific area of your garden that is susceptible to whatever is coming. We tend to have a mix of cool and warm season crops in the ground around spring and fall frost dates, so it’s rarely necessary to have to cover everything.
Market gardeners would want narrower but longer rolls of a similar material for their beds (which are usually 30″ wide and 50’+ feet long), but these are perfect for home or hobby gardeners. The size of these covers (8′ x 24′) make them ideal for covering a long row or a couple of raised beds. They’re small enough to easily fold up and conveniently store the next morning; just make sure you have given them a chance to dry so you don’t get mildew.
These covers will provide moderate frost protection but will not prevent your plants from freezing. The 60D fabric has essentially no insulation value, so the temperature under the cover is the same as the ambient environment. Keeping the frost off tender leaves is the difference between your plants pulling through some unpredictable weather and having to start over. A few of these covers are less than the value of your time and the money itself that you spent either starting seeds inside or on plant starts from a nursery.
Each package includes six landscape staples to secure the cover. Frost settles naturally on the top surface of vegetation, so it doesn’t matter if there is some space between your plants and the ground when this cover is on.