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Dances with Mice
05-02-2005, 13:55
I saw an idea somewhere on this site, and thought it was in this forum but I guess not, about using plastic stakes made to hold down landscape fabric.
Seemed like a good idea.

So I went to the Home Depot and looked in the landscape fabric area. There were large black plastic stakes for landscape fabrics, I bought a couple of them. There were also smaller green stakes used to hold down drip hoses - the green stakes had ridges on the portion that would go into the ground and a wide, flat notch built to hold a hose in place. They were cheap and much lighter than the black stakes. I bought 8 of those to hold down my 8 X 10 fly.

Report: The black plastic stakes are great. Lightweight, seem indestructible, they never pulled out. I used them for the side tie-outs of the HH.

The green irrigation hose stakes suck! I broke one per day, coming back with 3 of the 8 I started with. I always found somewhere to tie off the tarp, of course, but I didn't appreciate carrying out all those broken stakes.

By the end of the trip I was getting pretty creative...

Tramper Al
05-02-2005, 14:04
Hi,
Thanks for that report. Can you please post the weight of these (black) stakes, as well as their length? I think that would help a lot in deciding what advantage they might hold over traditional lightweight (0.25 - 0.5 oz) stakes, especially for tarp-tents (6" or greater ?).
Thanks!

NICKTHEGREEK
05-02-2005, 15:02
I saw an idea somewhere on this site, and thought it was in this forum but I guess not, about using plastic stakes made to hold down landscape fabric.
Seemed like a good idea.

So I went to the Home Depot and looked in the landscape fabric area. There were large black plastic stakes for landscape fabrics, I bought a couple of them. There were also smaller green stakes used to hold down drip hoses - the green stakes had ridges on the portion that would go into the ground and a wide, flat notch built to hold a hose in place. They were cheap and much lighter than the black stakes. I bought 8 of those to hold down my 8 X 10 fly.

Report: The black plastic stakes are great. Lightweight, seem indestructible, they never pulled out. I used them for the side tie-outs of the HH.

The green irrigation hose stakes suck! I broke one per day, coming back with 3 of the 8 I started with. I always found somewhere to tie off the tarp, of course, but I didn't appreciate carrying out all those broken stakes.

By the end of the trip I was getting pretty creative...
What were the soil conditions where you tried them? Rocky, sandy, duff, wet or dry? Would they stand up to being driven in with a rock?

Dances with Mice
05-02-2005, 15:30
What were the soil conditions where you tried them? Rocky, sandy, duff, wet or dry? Would they stand up to being driven in with a rock?

The soil was Georgia mountain soil - duff over loamy clay loaded with rocks and roots.

The black stakes would take being driven in with a rock, yes.

The green stakes held in the ground well but line tension would snap them. They aren't designed to withstand shear forces. And they don't.

There's a photo in my gallery showing the hammock/tarp in the background at Gooch Gap, my last night. Notice how the tarp is tied to two trees, a log, and one corner isn't tied out at all. But I had a bag of broken green stakes!