12th March

Our wind break has taken a beating from the recent weather which had been called the beast from the east, and last week was spent between harvesting blocking seeds and dismantling the damaged, broken, bent and twisted wind break.
At the time the beast from the east was doing its damage I was busy away skiing in France, and we were getting messages on the snow and wind that was hitting everyone at home, well we didn't get of lightly either, we missed our flight home because the bus couldn't get us to Grenoble airport in time because of the huge snowfall, we then had to book the only flight left, one into Gatwick, then there were no other flights home, so we hired car and drove home, our adventure in the end took us 30 hrs. to get home, it should have taken us around 6hrs from our accommodation to home.
Our windbreak has been standing for over 8 years, and has stood up to some huge storms, a few over 90 mph, and has saved the tunnels from getting flattened. The wind break is 5 metres high and and each post is braced with 2 staining wires supporting the posts against the strong west winds, we never get strong enough east winds, until now.
Its still a wee bit of a mystery of how it got flattened by a east wind, seemingly it wasn't that strong a wind, so I can only guess that it must have been the weight of the snow and wind that was getting blown in from the east constantly over the couple of days that the beast from the east was at its worst.
This week we need to get on with blocking the seeds, as we lost a bit of time last week with damage repair, most of the seeds that we have blocked and are in the hot box tunnel have germinated, but the blocked seeds that are in the big tunnel are still hibernating although at the end of last week the tunnel temperatures did start to heat up and we needed to do some watering.