Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here comes a whole book! The weather forecast called for overnight winds of 30 mph with occasional gusts of 50 mph in the higher elevations (which we are not). And anyway, 50 mph gusts are nothing to a gal who gardened through two “100 year” hurricanes within eight years of moving to the NC coast.
So I covered the kale, spinach, mustard and peas with row cover and weighted everything down with rocks (big rocks) every eight inches or so. I pulled the plastic up over the hoop tunnels where cabbage and broccoli were growing and weighted that down with more big rocks (did I ever mention that we have an ABUNDANCE of rock on our homestead???) Just kidding.
Next morning, hubby woke me up to tell me we had a full day’s work ahead of us putting the deer fence back up around the garden. Naively, I figured he meant that some of the plastic netting had torn loose from its anchor to the STEEL FENCE POSTS driven in the ground. But no. That’s not what he meant. Here’s what the damage looked like:
Some of the row cover was intact. The cover over the peas was not because I had already put small tree branches into the ground for the Green Arrow peas (which grow to about 36″ tall) to use as support, and the wind easily got up under the cover and blew it off. Lesson learned.
The wind actually bent the steel fence posts like they were made of putty. It even pulled the PVC pipe up off the Rebar on one corner of a hoop tunnel. That had to be some really strong wind. The downed trees in the background were already down. Those were some of the last trees we cleared a week or so ago to make sure the fenced garden got lots of sun and we still need to cut them up into firewood lengths. Yup, soon as we get the chain saw fixed. Another homesteading adventure I’ll tell you about sometime. HINT: chain saws do not like barbed wire. Hey, it was buried under a tree branch in a pile of leaves!
Anyway, anyone out there who is homesteading (or just gardening) at about 3,000 feet, I’d love some feedback. Is this normal in spring? Please tell me it’s not!
