Thin Air Harvest Practical gardening for the high, dry West

Section

Hail, wind, frost, and wildlife

Protecting a high-country garden from hail, wind, late frost, deer, rabbits, and voles, with fences and covers sized to the animal or the storm.

By the Thin Air Harvest editorial team. Updated November 1, 2026.

Weather and wildlife are infrastructure. A variety choice helps a little. A frame, a fence, and a habit of reading the forecast help a lot. This section is about those structures and about the temperature tables that tell you when to deploy them. It assumes you have already picked a station. If you have not, start with how to read a spring frost and then open the calendar for your state.

Hail is the Front Range specialty, and it is not confined there. CSU’s CO-Horts blog, attributing the window to the Colorado Climate Center, describes a hail season from April 15 through September 15. That span covers almost every week a vegetable garden is in the ground. A single June storm can shred lettuce, bruise developing fruit, and strip a tree canopy. Roots and potatoes underground are unbothered. Perennials with low crowns come back. The useful distinction is between a ten-minute cover you throw over a bed when the sky turns and a permanent hail-cloth house you walk into all summer. The hail page covers both, plus the aftercare CSU educators actually recommend: clean cuts on torn branches, no fertilizer push on a damaged tree, extra water in a dry spell, and damaged fruit picked up so it does not breed the next pest. Cloth that also throws light shade is a second benefit in this sun. Plastic sheeting is a poor hail roof. It sails in wind and cooks the crop if you cannot vent it.

Wind works all season, and it works in winter when you are not watching. Spring wind sandblasts transplants and shreds row cover. Summer wind multiplies the water a leaf loses. Winter wind, especially a chinook that is both dry and warm, desiccates evergreen foliage and can pull woody plants out of dormancy. A solid panel fence feels like protection and often makes a turbulent pocket on the leeward side. Windbreak design used by the Natural Resources Conservation Service favors a porous barrier, on the order of half open, which slows air for a distance downwind instead of dumping it over the top. The wind page puts that in garden scale: where to put the vegetable bed relative to the house, how to stake a new tree low and loose, and why a south-facing masonry wall is a frost tool and a winter problem at the same time. University of Idaho’s bulletin on woody plants in harsh climates notes that south and west walls can add on the order of five degrees of frost protection for nearby plantings, and that the same exposure can injure evergreens by swinging the temperature. Use the wall for the tomato. Do not use it as the home for a dwarf Alberta spruce.

Frost at planting time is a decision, not a mood. A week of 70°F afternoons in April along the Front Range is ordinary, and it is not the end of freezing nights. NOAA’s Denver Stapleton row in the Colorado freeze-occurrence table puts the median last 32°F spring date at April 30 and the 1-in-10 late date at May 13. Planting tender crops on the first warm Saturday of April is how the same gardener buys transplants twice. The reading-spring article explains radiational frost versus a windy advective freeze, why a thermometer on the house wall lies, and how the hardy, tender, and very tender classes in the CSU planting guide line up with those dates. The calendars turn the same idea into monthly tasks. Covers are the bridge on nights that fall between the two dates. Row covers and cold frames belong to the vegetable section because they are gardening tools, not weather theory. Use them with the dates, not instead of the dates.

Wildlife needs three different fences because it is three different animals. CSU’s deer fact sheet calls for an 8-foot woven-wire fence. The mountain vegetable sheet also allows two 4-foot fences set 4 feet apart, and a 2-foot fence of 1-inch mesh buried 6 inches for cottontails. Voles need quarter-inch hardware cloth, 18 inches above the ground and 3 to 6 inches into it, around young trunks. Repellents wash off. The wildlife page keeps the three prescriptions separate. The materials page turns the same fences, and a hail frame, into a list you can price at the lumberyard.

None of this infrastructure has to be ugly, but it does have to be specific. A garden with a hail frame over the kitchen beds, a porous windward shrub line, a frost cover in a crate by the door from April through June, and an 8-foot fence where deer trails are obvious will outproduce a garden with a more fashionable plant list and no protection. Build the dull things first. Then enjoy the plants that survive them.

Articles in this section