"0tterbot" wrote in message

massive whinge alert!!!!! g

Shit Otter! Don't get me started on the bloody wind or I will out whinge
you for weeks!

we've had horrendous winds for nearly two weeks.

Is that all? Jeeze woman, the dog kennels have been about a hundred feet in
the air with the poor dogs hanging at the ends of their chains as the tail
of the kite!

(Well that is a slight exaggeration, but not much).

i'm just about to lose my
mind outright - i'm near homicidal (along with half the town).

I've been telling my husband about how the suicide rate goes up when the
Mistral and the Sirocco blow and since he's just about tearing out his hair
because of what the wind is doing to our pastures, he could figure out why
that happens.

which is one
thing, but the difficulties the garden is having is quite another!!

i haven't helped myself at all by having planted out baby things just
before it started up, which means i'm trying to keep them alive by
watering 2-3 times a day until the wind calms down.

Put shade cloth on the windward side and mulch the baby things with a very
fine mulch like rice hulls and water it on well - the watering packs it down
a bit and if it is really low on the ground, the wind doesn't seem to get
it.

I too had similar problems to you, but now this problem is fixed as I rammed
8ft high star pickets on the windward side and put up sheep wire and then
put the shadecloth on the widward side of the sheep wire. The sheep wire
wiht it's big holes give just enough support to the shade cloth to stop it
beating itself to death in the wind. My shadecloth runs all along the
western side of the veg garden - prolly about 80 feet.

all my mulch is blowing away.

more than half my chooks are wigging out so badly they're off the lay &
are anxious all the time. the more laid-back hens are all right, but have
had to resort to digging deep holes & sitting in them with just their
heads popping out :-)

I also put shade cloth on the western side of the chook run. That protects
them when they are in the run and when they are let out into the orchard
(which is where their night house/run is located) they can find protection
under the fruit trees and in the clumps of big perennial grasses that grow
there.

various of the veg have responded to conditions by BOLTING & i don't think
i can bring them back.

the greenhouse has now been officially ruined (it didn't blow away but has
torn to pieces) so many of the wee things in punnets are also dead/dying -
and i have no greenhouse now. and i'm misting punnets 4-5 times/day to
keep the remainder alive.

to make matters worse, the chickens and garden are serially harrassed by
black choughs - the most evil birds in the world - who have picked this
week to come back. they dug out my blue-green ixia (to which i was very
much looking forward) & various other nice things, in their attempts to
steal all my worms (and i've worked very hard for my worms, dammit - there
just weren't any when we came so i've been very proud of how many i have
now). the choughs make the chooks even more stressed, me even more
stressed, & contribute to the mulch & hence soil all blowing away.

I also have choughs and although I really lover their chatter and social
habits, I too get the poops badly when they rip the garden to shreds. They
pulled up a whole lot of baby Red Orach (Mountain Spinach) seedlings the
other day and it was only because my husband dutifully pushed some back into
the earth that I have any left.

My chough cure in to cut up hoops of No 8 fencing wire and shove each end
into the ground and then cover it with bird netting and to lay bamboo stakes
horizontally along the sides between the edge of the wire and the edge of
the timber in my beds. I bought 3 metres of very wide stuff (white, not
black as I want birds to see it and not get tangled in it) and am gradually
cutting it up to cover things. I also did this to my strawberries this year
as last year I only got about 5 I think. A sodding Blue Tongue Lizard (the
size of a small dog) found they were delicious. He would look at me over
what passes for a Blue Tongued Lizard's shoulder ans stick out his toungue
and slurp in whole huge strawbs.

AAAARGH.

have you had winds where you are? how is the garden going??

I have a lovely crop of lettuce in what used to be my windiest spot and I
also have spinach. I bought a bunch of spicah, noticed that it still had
roots left on it although chopped and not a great deal, so I cut off the
leaves and planted the spinach in with the lettuces (all gown from minute
seedlings and mulched with rice hulls and covered with bird netting as
described above). I have rocket and corn salad and red Orach and lots of
other things in a more protected part of the garden (really a flower bed but
that is the best place to grow them at this time of year. Sodding winds.
Sodding cold.

kylie, who is losing it.

Join the club :-))