Or: Helping your garden survive a heat wave with salvaged materials
Reemay is a non-woven, spun-bond polyester fabric. Paper conservators use it for many purposes: supporting artwork during bathing or humidification, as a release layer for mending or lining, etc. Textile conservators also use it for similar purposes. Object conservators can use it too: as an archival storage material, for leather repairs, to make Halloween ghost decorations, and so forth. Reemay can be reused in the lab. But sometimes it just gets too funky to keep using on artwork and artifacts. This is where my hoarding sensibilities really pay off. I can't bear the thought of tossing old Reemay just because it's dirty by conservation standards, because it's still really clean by garden standards. So instead of throwing it out, I take it home, while mumbling, "Score!"
Reemay gets used in the garden quite a lot. Usually in garden catalogues it's called "floating row cover," or some variant of that. It will let water in, and a portion of light. Depending on the thickness or weight of the particular Reemay you have, you can use it to protect your plants from light frosts or exclude bugs. This particular heat-wave weekend, I'm using some scraps I've saved to provide shade for pea and flower seedlings that I had sowed earlier in the month, when it was really really cold (not loving this confused weather). We're expecting at least another two days of temperatures near or past the century mark, and I'm not sure how well this is going to work, but I figure it's worth a shot.
