Originally Posted by elbows

My wife and I just finished our first short camping tour with a homemade tarp-tent. The camping all went fine... we were using some cheap aluminum stakes from our old dome tent, but the tarp requires more stakes and they need to be anchored more securely. The stakes we have bend easily and we had had trouble getting them in to the hard ground.

What kind of stakes do people recommend? And do you just push them into the ground by hand, pound them with a rock, or what?

We live in the northeast and mostly tour close to home, so we're dealing with hard-packed, rocky ground most of the time.