I am using a variety of things for windbreaks. Wood slat snow fence is good, about 60% of the wind passes through, the rest goes over. Pallets wired to the field fence surrounding the vegetable garden are effective too, some wind goes through some over. Both can double as shades to plant something along the north side. Straw bales tipped over in the wind when double stacked, and the wind came down strong about 20 feet away and flattened a row of bush beans, so I learned that some of the wind must pass through.
Windbreaks
I've used partial straw bales (usually flakes 6"-10" high) and sometimes rocks or plastic jugs filled with water as partial windbreaks for newly transplanted seedlings. But except for an occasional dustdevil, my strongest winds usually are S or W or SW, so it is fairly easy to position the flake/rocks/jug to shelter and also partially shade new seedlings. Seedlings so sheltered seem to have thicker and stronger stems/trunks close to ground level, and to grow larger than unsheltered seedlings of the same plant type.
Thanks for the tip not to doublestack bales.
Did your wind-flattened bean row recover?
I have Planted my windbreaks, A row of Eucalyptus, and Desert Willow and Olive Trees.
Tashak2, the beans were watered right away after they were flattened, but I did not try to stand them up. I put some strawbale flakes under the low side to keep them off the ground. They kept producing as if nothing had happened!! Now I plant them in double rows about a foot apart. They help each other that way. When they grow to mature size the leaves just touch and it keeps the soil cooler. I only tried pole beans three years. First I grew them on a fence, they fried in the sun. Then I grew them on fallen tree branch teepees with 6 poles each, the ones on the south side fried, the ones on the north side didn't get enough sun and the ones on the east and west did ok. They were hard to cultivate around and so I went to bush beans. One year the teepees blew over taking some of the beans with them. I stood them up and anchored them with 5 gallon jugs of water using a cord from the center of the teepee to the jug handle. The jugs came from the trash at the local cafe, they had cooking oil in them originally. They lasted 2 years in the sun, probably because they were shaded by the beans part of the day. Those jugs would make good windbreaks, I had not thought of that until now.
This message was edited Sunday, Nov 4th 1:14 PM
This message was edited Sunday, Nov 4th 1:20 PM