We were due for severe weather with large hail yesterday afternoon through the evening. I debated how best to try to protect my young plants and decided clothes-pinning sheets above and around the plants was best, though if we did, indeed, get baseball-sized hail as one of the forecasts said, nothing would save them.
I found some plastic deep trays in the shop and put them on top of each of the sprinklers in the planter boxes here. Then I spread the sheet and clothes-pinned them around the legs of the box supports.
The plants came through fine. My husband estimated that the hail we received was about 1/2 inch – 5/8 inch. It was making so much noise during the worst of it that we couldn’t hear each other talk. We were standing together with the back door open, looking out through the screened porch. It was pretty impressive.
Above is one of the best head lettuce plants we have. Isn’t it pretty?
And this is one of the best spinach plants. I need to get out and trim off some broken or dead plant parts, plus do a bit of weeding, but I’m SO happy that they came through what could have been devastation just fine.
The tomato plants made it through, too. I wrapped the sheets around the supports and clothes-pinned the sheets as tightly as possible. This is the smaller, square planter. There are four tomato plants here. They should perk up a bit more now that the sheet is off and they can be in the sunshine.
This is the second tomato planter. There are six plants here. I clothes-pinned one king-sized sheet over the whole support system here and then tightened the edges around the bottom as much as I could.
Here’s a close up of one of the tomato plants. I can’t wait until we have ripe tomatoes to cut up for lunches and dinners!
It’ll take quite a bit of the day to get the 6 sheets washed, dried, and stored in the bag in the shop waiting for next time.
creativeartworksblog 