Tucked In

I hope you all can be tucked into a nice, warm bed during this cold spell. Our strawberries are. When the weather falls much below freezing, we cover them with their blankets. These blankets are a lightweight woven fabric that we had custom-made to match our row length. Each blanket is 30 feet wide and around 200 feet long. Every 6-8 feet, we place a bag of rocks as a weight to hold the blankets in place. The blankets block the wind from the plants and trap some of the geothermal heat from the ground. Seventy percent of the sunlight can pass through the blankets, so the plants can survive under cover for several days. We take them on again, and off again as the weather dictates. So far this year, they have been covered and then uncovered about 5-6 times. With 3-4 people, we can cover or uncover in around an hour. SO far, these have worked really well, even if they are a little labor-intensive. However, they haven't been tested at the temperature they're likely to encounter on Monday night. Hopefully, they will keep up the great performance. I'd be remiss and probably scolded if I failed to mention that my kids filled up around 750 bags of rocks when we started this project. I was busy that day, and we needed the weights for the blankets. They came through as usual.