I have not found very many tent stakes that actually work that well with soft ground and wind. Probably the better ones I’ve found among the small stakes are the shepherd-hooks that have a long hook such that you can nail both the stake and the hook into the ground so they don’t spin around as the wind whips the tent. The others are the very long aluminum nails and larger aluminum shepherd hooks. Those seem to hold the front/back pretty well, but we’ve had to actually use a drill and modify them so the nail head doesn’t come off and they still fail pretty easily without a giant rock. Y-shaped or X-shaped are kind of next best and then small titanium shepherd hooks with shallow hooks are the worst.
I saw garden cloth staples are a thing and wondered, would those work? Could those replace shepherd hooks for corners and maybe be used to add a little extra protection for the longer nails on the front and back?
Here’s our typical setup with our little shepherd hooks on the corners and the nails on the front/back and then the size of rocks that seem adequate to hold it all together in the wind (kinda hard to tell that it was windy in this picture).
