Today Tara and I covered the Olivia restaurant's garden with heavy row cover. Well, actually we started doing it yesterday. I thought it would be so easy so we slept in a bit and went to the garden around 9. First I had to pull a few lettuces that had already started to bolt and replace them with new ones I started from seed at home. Then we started with the row cover.
I split a roll of 300' with my boss at the landscaping company so I had 150' approximately of fabric that is 15' wide. I decided that the easiest least expensive thing to do would be to just lay it on top across the whole garden. It doesn't really freeze that hard in town here so I just want to provide a bit of protection. Yesterday we barely finished stretching a run of fabric across a few rows before I had to leave for work. I guess I didn't really think through the process of getting such a large piece of fabric situated just so and then running back and forth with heavy rocks. All in all the job took the two of us about 3 hours. I've never really seen other people put out their row cover on such a large area. I was thinking of going back next week to adjust a few things. Any advice for working on a garden while a row cover is up? I'm not really looking forward to taking it on and off every week to check the garden, or running over there frantically to throw the fabric back on if the weather decides to turn cold again. But I suppose that's what people do. We will definitely get faster at it. Especially now that all the rocks are there.
