Wind Damage in the Garden

The past week things have been really windy around here. Gusty trades but quite strong. Luckily no trees have come down, but the wind has been causing damage in the gardens. As expected, the banana leaves have been shredded, but it doesn't seem to bother the banana trees all that much. The veggies are a different story. 

Around the edges of the corn patch, a number of stalks have blown over. The corn is at a stage where it's already done the pollination thing, so I don't see that this is going to be a real problem. The corn patch is small and I will be hand harvesting, so no losses expected. 

The potato plants got whipped around, but most were small in size and took the beating pretty well. Of the larger plants, I see about 10% got snapped off at the base. So that's a loss since they hadn't produced tubers yet. 

The young cauliflower suffered the worse with about a 50% loss. The wind twirled the baby plants, severely damaging their stems at ground level. 

I took some close up photos trying to show the damage, but it's difficult to see. The tops literally got twirled around leaving just some fibers holding the tops to the roots. I mounded up the soil around the I damaged plants to help protect them. 

Some of the younger bean plants lost leaves but otherwise survived. Most everything else did ok. Luckily I didn't have the young tomato transplants anywhere they'd be vulnerable. I've been looking into setting up hoops for low tunnels in order to protect against excess rain and the drying sun, but they sound like a good idea for protection against strong winds too.