Look at my carrot protection frame with its drawers around its ankles! That's wind for you. My parents came to see me (and the garden) and my dad said I needed to protect my carrots from carrot fly with a 2 foot barrier. He suggested horticultural fleece. So I put together a bamboo frame. I even lashed the parts where three canes meet (albeit not to a standard that would make my guide leader proud) because the holes I cut in my Actimel bottles weren't enough to hold three canes in place at once. Two is their max.
It was meant to look like this:
But then the wind came along and suddenly it had its drawers around its ankles quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. Well, not literally, but less than a day after I'd put it up. It wasn't even particularly strong wind. I'd taken it down for those days of heavy gusts, fearing it would fly out of my garden like a departing Mary Poppins. This was just relatively normal wind today.
Those very strong winds from earlier in the week did their own damage though.
They blew the top straight off my courgette with a broken stem (you can see the remaining stem on the left) and also off a butternut squash that had previously seemed fine. Luckily I had planted another courgette seed in the ground right next to the damaged one because I had feared it wouldn't last long. It came up shortly after the other one departed. I'm hoping it acclimatises to the wind that's rampant in my garden at the moment. The butternut squash has been replaced by the spare winter squash that I had left over after finishing my planting, so I now have three of each instead of four and two.
In other news, some of the peas I planted directly in the ground are also coming up, which is good, as the slugs and snails love peas, so the existing ones have suffered a lot of damage.
No comments:
Post a Comment