What's Been Going On - 1

I have, obviously, been very absent from working on this blog. Firstly I have run straight in to the brick wall of apathy. I always have plenty of projects so I can switch from one thing to another as the mood strikes. Unfortunately the mood hasn't been striking for building or painting. Plus there is the annual garden prep which is where my efforts to building something have come into play.

Starting back in late April, early May, my wife and I made plans for garden projects. Planting a Colorado garden can't realistically start until Mother's Day and even that can be iffy. My wife likes to wait till Memorial Day (which is pretty early this year but we went with it). Since the garden was going to feature a lot of squash and some other climbers I wanted to replace the little A-Frame from last year with something much more substantial. I also wanted to remove the very ugly anti-hail "covers" that we have used for the last couple of years with something more effective and easier to put up. We spent way to much time taking the covers on and off last season and I wanted to avoid that this year. Those covers were never meant to permanent anyway.

I basically built these climbing frames around the existing raised beds. The new anti-hail frame (basically a very big pergola) started after I finished these. We found some anti-hail netting and it was on order and, of course, it was delayed. In the meantime pergola construction started and my wife planted the seedlings that she started in the greenhouse (squashes, peppers, zucchini and pumpkins for sure, I can't keep track).

The east side frame, this is built around a 6' raised bed.

The west side frame, this is built around an 8' raised bed.

Then this happened

The storm started around 10pm which was strange to begin with. This is the mix of sizes we found the next morning. Yes, there were tears.

This is a piece of golf ball sized piece of hail. This is after it had lain on the lawn for  about 8 hours. Punched holes in siding, cracked to dome skylights, dented all the gutters and our poor Jeep Gladiator was outside and the hood has about 50-60 dents in it from hail strikes. Fortunately it did not shatter the windshield and the removable composite roof and fenders as well as the bed were undamaged.

Between the beginning of construction and the arrival of the anti-hail netting we got pummeled by major hail storm on May 30th. This ruined an entire weekends worth of planting, not to mention major damage to the rooves on all four buildings. Gutters were not only dimpled on the bottom but on the sides from ricochets. The east side of the garage actually had holes punched into the siding. 

The netting arrived the next day and I pushed through and finished the pergola and got the netting stretched across it. Which was good because we had another, much smaller, hail storm that week. The netting worked like a charm.

East side of the pergola. On this side its either anchored directly to a raised bed or is supported by a cedar 4x4.

Cross members looking towards the south.

On the west side the pergola is anchored to the fence. Its all cedar 2x4s on this side as are the cross members.

On this side the netting is fastened with hooks on the top rail of the fence.

This is the smallest netting we could get which is 50'x30'. Which means we have a lot of extra but we can't really cut it because of the edging. On the east side its just held down with bricks.

I have a couple of ideas to be able to keep the netting above head level but still be able to pull it down to cover the ends in case of a storm,

It actually provide quite a bit of shade on the inside. I have since taken down the supports for the old anti-hail covers.