Some Colorado gardeners keep a garden diary. For those who do, in any given year, entries might look similar to this:
June 18: Lots of small tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers on plants. Carrots 4 inches tall. Lettuce, broccoli, basil all thriving. Perennial and annual flowers gorgeous.
June 19: Hail.
It’s the one thing we fear the most and what we see way too often. In one four-year period in the late 1990s, we had the roof on our home replaced three times.
The Front Range of Colorado has more hail than anywhere in the country, and it doesn’t take a shingle-shredder of a storm to devastate a vegetable or flower garden. A few minutes of pea-sized hail won’t destroy plants but will cause enough damage to set them back for weeks. Dime-sized hail will demolish your garden in as little as five minutes.
When black thunderheads roll in over the mountains, we all look out the windows with feelings of helplessness and dread. I can only imagine what farmers, who gamble with the weather every year, think when they see hail.
Several years ago, after walking out to mourn my beat-down plants that had been nurtured for months and had been glorious 20 minutes earlier, I said enough. Design and innovation are not my strong points, but I finally came up with something I thought would work.
I was growing vegetables in 8-foot by 8-foot raised beds. I bought some rigid PVC pipe and figured out how to connect it together using elbow and T-joints to construct table-like platforms that would fit over the beds.
I built them 38 inches tall to allow me room to work under them and attached quarter-inch wire-mesh screen at the top of the platforms with circular clamps.
They aren’t pretty, but they do the job. They let plenty of sunlight through, are light enough to be moved by one person (two is easier) and have saved my plants numerous times.
It is comforting and gratifying to see hailstones bouncing harmlessly off the screens.
There are a few downsides to these gizmos. Not everyone gets them. Visiting friends who see them for the first time are curious and possibly appalled.
The hail screens are portable and can be removed from the beds, but you certainly want them on when there is any threat of a storm. They are large and cumbersome, and storage can be a problem.
They are difficult to work under, and the taller you are the harder it is to get under them. The wire mesh can cause a deep scratch. Children pulling on them can break the PVC pipes.
In truth, most of the time I hate the unsightly things. Except when I notice lightning and black clouds roiling over the Wet Mountains and moving our way. In those moments, I love them.
Gerald Miller is a master gardener who lives in Pueblo.
