prep for garden in severe weather
 

This year we decided to really focus hard on the garden and can as much as possible to give us a better idea what it would really take to grow enough veggies/etc. to get the family of 5 through the winter.
The sad realization for us is the garden just got wiped out by golf ball plus sized hail and is about a 80% loss. I cannot imagine how devastating this would be if we didn't have the options of buying from the store/etc. We of course will not be starving with the loss at this point in time but it does raise some serious concerns for me.
This is the 2nd year out of 4 yrs the garden has been destroyed by large hail storms (which are not usually this common) where we live.)
How have any of you planned to combat this type of issue in the future if the garden you plant is all you have?
I can see a sturdy greenhouse but maybe that would be damaged in golf ball to baseball sized hail? any ideas?

This is one reason why storing two or more years worth, when you have it, is so important. It would be nice to be able to garden one year at a time, but reality usually demands looking ahead a bit further.

I would think of doing the greenhouse. This is the first year that my garden flopped. We live in such a low-lying area that with all the rain, it flooded, then the heat scorched it.

Yup, we try to keep 2 years ahead when we can and dehydrate.
If the garden isn't destroyed by hail or flood or high winds there are still pests, dogs, chickens and deer.
(chickens somehow got to my pumpkins Sunday...BooHoo!)

I had that happen the first year we had our garden, I was surprised how much of the garden came back. It didn't produce as well as it should have, but it did produce. As said before you just keep gardening and can all it produces. Which means you need lots of extra jars.

Yep same here, we keep at least 2 years ahead and sometimes 3. You cannot control mother nature ! Deer, Beatles, Squash bugs YES, but not mother nature.

If your life depends on it, you will figure out some way to make it work.

Good luck !

I like to preserve what I forage besides what I grow so I started putting up two + years worth when I found bountiful amounts as frequently the next year would yield little. It is scary though , makes me think of times past , what happened when all you had was potatoes growing and a blight got them?
I also agree with Squashnut , you will hopefully get more than you think

I've been working on having just one or two "mega" plants such as a Green Bell Pepper.
It's two years old now having Wintered over @ my Mom's apartment. It almost died several time from neglect. This Winter it will placed near the wood stove in our home. Repotted in a larger container.
Currently there's 5 peppers about a week away from picking, another handful that are two weeks away & numerous blossoms.
I'm also planning on potting up an eggplant to over Winter inside and bring in one of the Burpee Long Keepers that have been growing in a 10 gallon bucket.
I might also bring in a Cherokee Purple that I have in a container.

For those of you that have more room would it be feasible to grow mega veggies. Devote time & effort into one plant - scaffolding, cover as needed for hail or an early frost, irrigation, insect control.
Thinking 55 gallon plastic drum for container, sunken PVC pipe that has holes drilled in for irrigation, & extremely composted soil.

It's just a thought something that's been playing around in my head. While we rarely have hail storms I do have an issue with lack of Sunlight in 80% or my yard. If I could grow a few mega veggies in that 20% area that has sunlight I'd be golden.


~~ pelenaka ~~

Start looking at garage sale, thrift shops, etc for cheap bed sheets. Start working on acquiring supplies (pvc, lumber, pipes, etc) to construct a hoop house type structure for a part of your garden.

Build a frame that you can add those sheets to, to help protect your garden in the event of a heavy rain coming (rain can still get through the sheets but it should hold back hail). In the space you can protect plant enough of each crop to have some to eat and some to save seeds from. Extend the "protected" area each year as you acquire more materials.

I have 4-4x8 raised beds...ideally I want to be able to build such a set-up to cover one of those beds. I may not be able save the entire garden, but I can protect some of it. Ultimately I'd like to put grommets into the sheet as tie down points that I can lay over the cattle panels we use for trellising beans and such. That would help everything underneath. DH wants to get enough plastic sheeting to turn this same bed (with the cattle panel over it) into a "greenhouse" in the spring and fall.

Winter garden,so you mean winter and never fail too boot?

Then you are talking SPROUTS,NEVER fails,ready in days,full of nutrition.

We rarley have hail that large, but I have thought about the moving blankets we have for the glass in the roof of the greenhouse. Am looking at building a hoop house over 1/3 of the garden for a longer growing season. In the process of scrapping right now.There is a woven clear poly they make ,I suppose it would be good for your hail problem. Farmtek has it,pretty sure. I don't follow any gidelines anymore on how much of each thing i need to cann, I just cann what comes in.

I'd replant what I could as quickly as I could and use row tunnels when the cold comes. even after we get a killing frost, there are plenty of days where it's warm- it's the nights that bring the cold. I keep a supply of quick-to-harvest plants - spinach, beets, chinese cabbages, peas, etc for just such a circumstance.

i will check out the hoop houses. I guess I assumed being plastic sheeting it would not hold up to high winds and hail too well but maybe I will be surprised.
Not sure how a conventional greenhouse would hold up either as the neighbor 1 mile down the road had windows and windshield of vehicles busted out.
They had closer to baseball size hail though.
Just evaluating options and trying what I can to make sure I can protect a garden if needed down the road.
Woring hard on storing food but the way the economy is now is making that more difficult each week.
Thanks for the ideas.

We mostly use hoop houses for our food production. The way my dad constructed them, nothing to date has been able to damage them. We used cattle panels, framed them out with 2by 4's for strength, covered them with chicken wire, and then covered them with 6 mil plastic. Hail just bounces right off. Severe thunder storms have done nothing. Deep snow ( a real surprise for down here ) didn't hurt them either. We are able to get a better crop in the winter. One heat lamp keeps things from freezing. In summer, we open the ends and the milky plastic actually helps keep the plants from scorching. All my plants in the green house are very nice while everything out in the main garden is trashed. We have had terrible heat here. Even tomatoes and peppers grown out in the open are burned to a crisp. We are now working on more houses because it has become evident to us that if we want a garden around here, it will have to be protected from this extreme heat.

plant..plant..plant...plant

Star a new thread...I want to see pictures, please :clap: This is what DH wants to do, too.

Ok Ohio dreamer. When my husband gets back home tomorrow, I will try to remember to post a thread about those hoop houses. I am not able to post because I am barely computer literate.

Diversity. The key to successful harvests is diversity. Hail will do little damage to underground crops like potatoes and turnips which are ready to harvest. Short season crops can be grown along with regular crops. Plants in containers can be moved indoors if you have warnings of severe weather. There is still time for fall planting. Early spring crops would have been out of the garden before this hail hit.

I'm sorry your gardens have been destroyed. I know how heartbreaking it is to see all that work torn to shreds in a matter of minutes.

love the cattle panel chicken wire and plastic sheeting idea. I have most of that sitting at home already.
Might throw something up if I can get the area cleaned and tilled and ready to plant this weekend.

what didn't burn in the heat and drought was eaten by grasshoppers, my bug patrol (chickens) was killed off by dogs. doesn't look like much chance for a fall garden either.
Ed

I think this year is one of those "put up more than 1 year's worth" realization years for many. And for those that already knew it's one of those that just reinforces the idea.

I built two 14 x 25 hoop greenhouses in Western SD and used that woven polyvinyl covering. The hail bounces off that stuff as do falling tree branches, snow slides off. You cannot even punch a hole in it with a nail! Wonderful stuff, put it up once and mine were still in perfect condition after 12 years of high wind and -20 degree winter temps. I got mine at Northern Greenhouse folks in ND. My daughter just ordered and received her covering a month ago to build her's down the mountain in Rapid City, on the plains. 80% light filtration, UV protection. Never yellows, never shreds or tatters, stays soft and supple no matter what. WELL worth the cents per running foot.

I think that this is key... Many of us may not have enough planted to be able to do it this year. We should look to farmer's markets, gardening neighbors and produce loss leaders at the grocery store to try to shore up our stored foods. There are some veggies that I won't grow due to a poor harvest but I can buy them at the market and can them with ease.

What's the name of the woven poly covering? Thanks.

No "brand" name, just woven poly

http://www.northerngreenhouse.com/

I second the above. Heavy hoop houses, and lots of them, built the way Kim described with the chicken mesh on them covered with heavy plastic or the woven polyvinyl coverings. Big hail stones just bounce of that stuff because of the chicken wire absorbing and distributing the impacts of them. In the summer if it's too blazing hot with high UV index you can open it up for air and cover the tops of the hoop houses with the black greenhouse cloths (or even tree branches) for shade and added coolness. Plus there's less risk of bigger critters raiding hoop houses since they don't like to try to get inside enclosed, covered areas. Another plus is that there's less loss of essential moisture inside hoop houses.

Ultra Violet radiation kills plants, it is getting worse and worse and that is something that all home gardeners are going to have to take into consideration in future growing seasons.

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I second the woven poly from Northern Greenhouse Sales. We use ours only in the winter, removing it in the spring. We have two pieces, one in use since 2000 and the other since 2001.

When I first got this place, I had lots of chickens, peacocks, guineas, ducks, and other animals. My garden was fenced, but we added chicken wire over the top to keep the poultry out. It was fairly easy using 6' wire with a few tall posts in various locations.

It worked for hail too. Some hail got thru, but the majority of it would hit the wire and lose it's force before hitting the ground. We often hear and see unintentional consequences, but this time I ran into an unintentional benefit. :)

When I got quail, I put them in the garden area and they ate bugs while leaving the produce alone. That was a win/win since they eliminated many bugs and provided a small amount of meat and eggs for the table.

I have a greenhouse and keep an extra cover ready JIC. For my smaller tunnels- I cover them at night with a blanket if needed.

Lots of great ideas here!

Great thread and it shows why we should strive to produce even greater than what we think we need... Can, freeze, dehydrate enough for two or three years and in years of plenty trade or donate the surplus... In lean years add what you have etc... Get out of thinking there's always a grocery store because there may not always be a grocery store... Even a small space can produce a lot with intensive gardening...

This is the worst of three bad years in a row...and the topper being 60-70mph winds that blew our greenhouse down. Knew it would go as had some torn plastic and if the wind gets in your are doomed. Fall plan was new plastic which we have enough of on hand to cover twice. Well, we planned to move it to another location and put on more permanent foundation.

If our garden was our survival plan we'd be doomed....maybe we could shoot the bear that took out our bees last week....uck; tasted bear once and it was way nasty! But my latest inventory shows we are still ok and a cow ready for freezer camp....assuming another calamity doesn't hit. DEE

I discovered the UV rays did a lot of damage to our garden, including our newly planted comfrey. I have been planning for raised beds next year with shade cloths that will negate some of this.

Since I'm wanting long-lasting structures as much as long-lasting foods, I have ruled out the PVC pipes as they are going to need to be replaced every few years. [So much to learn!]

One week of those awful tempatures did alful damage to our garden. It didn't help too much with me watering it alot. But It was bakeing,so I steamed it.:ashamed: Eather way, a 35' row of summer squash,gave me as much as probably one plant.

Didn't plant a garden this year as I needed a break, but 2 years ago my garden suffered really bad from the intense heat and too much drought. I didn't think about building a hoop house, probably should have. Anyway, last year I moved my garden area closer to the tall timber that adjoins my place, calculating that it would go into shade at about 2 and 3 pm every day, and it did. That worked pretty good, production was off some, but not destroyed. The shade provided more comfort for garden chores as well. Now I'm just going to add 20 ft. to each of the 18 rows that are now 70 ft. long. The yearly drought is what really infuriates me. Looking at the farm tek site, I'm thinking about adding drip tape irrigation. Just depends on cost.

Mutti, if the bear meat you tried tasted nasty, it may have been a rank old boar, or it may have been eating something nasty. I've eaten meat from several bears, and it was always good. I wouldn't hesitate to eat bear meat again (just make sure it's well done, as bears can have trichinosis, just like feral pigs can).

Kathleen

I've been wanting to try a hoop house. I have a hoop but dh fills it with ground up leaves each fall and this year hasn't gotten it cleared out due to the heat. My problem is snow drifts as high as the house between me and the hoop and the only other place to put it would be where it drifts.

I agree with canning/freezing/dehyrdrating everything when you have it to cover you through the bad years. It ties up a lot of jars but its worth it. We're just not finishing up 2008 green beans. Canned a lot again in 2009 but hardly any in 2010 or 2011. The expression "make hay while the sun shines" sort of covers this.

Ann, can you put up a snow fence?

What I did was to scoop out the paths between rows and make them wide and flat. I put earth dams at both ends of each trench. Then I run the hose from the pond pump into the trenches. The water soaks in and the plants are doing very well. Also the weeds aren't at all bad in the rows, though I have to hoe the trenches regularly. I do 5-10 min of hoeing each day and that is all that is needed. This is on 1000sf of garden.

Good going there Cyngbaeld, I know that works well as I did it back when the garden was smaller and in a better location for it. My problem is that my water source is 600 ft away, and is a well pump. I about wore myself out fooling around with trying to water the garden, so for me the drip tape will do it all at once and apply it directly where needed and not break the bank on running the well pump. Hopefully with the new and growing compost pile and some water as needed, I can actually downsize the garden into being more productive. But I have to see how the water system works first. I want to maximize production on the smallest plot necessary to produce all I need. I'm producing that now, but the workload is a bummer for 1 person........and I understand what you mean about that hoeing. I get to it early in the day and limit the time to 30 minutes, done or not. That keeps the grass out very well. Good luck with your garden.