Hey DM-
I'm glad you've found a low-tech, simple solution for shading your garden. It wouldn't work well for my setup. I'm only growing corn and cucumbers in the EarthTainers. I'm still on my fools-quests to find a way to grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplant in V. and F. (multi-races) infested beds. My property is basically on a hill that is man-augmented to be full of river-rocks and boulders of every size and shape, so there truly is no space on my property where you can drive a stake down for more than say 8" tops before it hits some impenetrable boulder or stone. The only way I've dealt with this is with pick and shovel and brute labor. So if I needed to put a stake 18" in the ground, I would have to dig a 2-foot diameter hole down at least a foot, and since all my garden beds are on top of terraces that are themselves structurally precarious, I'm not interested in digging large holes at their bases. Inside the beds, I have the nice soft soil that I'm growing in, so it doesn't make a good receptor of staking or supports for the opposite reasons.
BTW, when I returned home from work yesterday, I was dismayed to find my entire PVC rig with shade-cloth had toppled head-over heals. All the corn stocks took a real bush-whacking. I'm not sure how well they'll recover. I'm holding off on adding the cloth back until I can convince myself that this will not happen for again (for the umpteenth time). I'm thinking to weight down the bases of my pVC structure and cut holes in the shade "sail" to hopefully reduce the drag it can pull.
--naysen
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