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The shade cloth I used last year was a small 50% shade cloth that my wife had purchased to shade her dogs at dog shows. The tomatoes I covered thrived and looked perfectly healthy and produced well until the first frost. I garden in buried pots because of the totally sand “ground” around here so I also moved several tomato plants to where they received shade from a tree about 60% of the time. Those plants did keep producing but didn’t look nearly as healthy as the plants that had full cover of the shade cloth for the full day. It was a dramatic lesson for me.

This year I ordered a 60% shade cloth and am currently building the frame to put it over. I used 8’ landscape timbers that we had here and set them 1 ½’ into the ground and am putting 2x3s at the top from pole to pole to drape the shade cloth over. The poles are set 8’ apart both ways. So that puts the shade cloth about 6 ½’ above the ground.

BTW I lost most of the rest of my garden which wasn’t shaded as well last year. Bottom line is, what I shaded kept producing and what I didn’t died.