Thin Air Harvest Practical gardening for the high, dry West

Weather and wildlife

Hail protection for Front Range and high-plains gardens

A seasonal hail risk needs cloth and hoops, not a panic tarp. What to cover, what survives, and how to clean up after a storm.

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

Hail is a normal part of the growing season on the Front Range and across much of the high plains, not a once-in-a-career disaster. Colorado State University’s CO-Horts blog, citing the Colorado Climate Center, puts the hail season from April 15 through September 15.

That window covers lettuce in May, tomatoes in July, and ripening apples in September. A garden plan that does not include a cover is a plan that will be replanted after the first serious storm. The cover does not have to be elaborate. It has to be ready.

Two different tools

A ten-minute cover is a tarp, a blanket, or a piece of frost fabric you throw over a bed when the sky turns green and the forecast says hail. It saves a planting if you are home and if the wind does not turn the tarp into a sail that breaks the plants it was meant to protect.

Weight the edges before the wind arrives, and get inside. Do not hold a metal frame in a thunderstorm. This tool is for people who are around in the afternoon, which is when many of these storms arrive. It is a poor plan for a traveler or for a weekday gardener.

A seasonal structure is hoops or a cattle-panel frame with hail cloth, the woven mesh sold for this purpose, left on through the hail season. CSU educators note a second benefit: a modest amount of shade in this intense sun often helps the plants rather than hurting them. The cloth has to be open enough that light and rain get through, and the frame has to be tied down.

Solid plastic sheeting is the wrong skin. It balloons in wind, it excludes rain, and on a hot afternoon it cooks the crop unless you are there to vent it. Plastic belongs on a low tunnel you manage daily, which is a row-cover job, not a hail roof you leave for July.

Build the frame when you build the raised bed. Sockets for hoops, or a panel bent over the bed and staked at both sides, should be in place before the plants need them. A frame you invent the evening of the first storm is a frame that is still in the garage.

What to put under the cloth

Cover the crops hail actually ruins: lettuce and other greens, ripening strawberries, soft fruit, and any vegetable whose leaves are the harvest. Potatoes and root crops underground do not need a roof for the roots’ sake, though a shredded top will slow them.

Onions can take a beating and still make a bulb if the storm is early. Tomatoes may lose leaves and still ripen a reduced crop if the stems are intact.

A small tree will releaf. The fruit on that tree is another matter. A few currant bushes under cloth are a better hail strategy than an uncovered cherry tree. The small-fruit page makes that case.

Perennials with low crowns, the grasses and penstemons on the Front Range plant page, look destroyed and then return. A border designed around those plants is a border designed for this climate. A border of tall annuals is a border you will replant.

Do not cover the entire property. Cover the kitchen beds and the berry row. Let the buffalo grass get hit. It will be fine, and you will have spent the money where the food is.

After the storm

CSU’s hail guidance for woody plants is restrained, and it is the right tone for the vegetable garden too. Remove broken, hanging branches with clean cuts. Do not paint the wounds.

Do not fertilize a damaged tree or a shredded perennial to force soft growth. Water deeply if the soil is dry, because the plant has lost leaves and the weather after a hailstorm is often hot.

Leave a tree that still has some leaves. Those leaves are feeding it. A young tree that looks thin usually leafs out again if the bark is not split all the way around.

On vegetables, pick damaged fruit so it does not rot and attract pests. Replant only what still has time to finish, using the days-to-maturity arithmetic and your real fall frost date. Lettuce and radishes can go back in. A pumpkin cannot, if it is already mid-July at elevation.

Greens that are shredded but have an intact growing point often regrow and are better than a new sowing.

Wait a few days before you pull them. The garden looks worse the evening of the storm than it will in ten days.

Do not spray a fungicide “just in case” without a diagnosis. Open wounds can invite disease, and the response if something develops is a current extension note, not a preventive drench the same night.

Cloth, shade, and wind together

Hail cloth that throws light shade is an asset in June sun at 5,000 feet and higher, where transplants scorch. It is not a substitute for water. A shaded bed still dries, sometimes faster if the wind can move under the frame.

Check the soil with a probe. Pin the cloth so it is not sanding the leaves. A loose edge in wind does more mechanical damage than small hail.

If you garden where hail is rare and wind is constant, spend the money on the windbreak first, described in wind. If you garden on the Palmer Divide, in Aurora’s hail corridor, or on the open plains east of Denver and Cheyenne, build the hail frame first. Both problems can be true. A frame that is also a windbreak for the bed, open on the ends, solves part of each.

Cloth, frames, and the size of the bed

A practical kitchen-garden frame is only as long as the beds you actually eat from. Two beds, four feet wide and eight to twelve feet long, can share one cattle-panel tunnel or a line of hoops. Cattle panels are stiff enough to shed a wet cloth and a modest snow if you forget them in October, and they need to be staked or screwed down so a straight-line wind does not roll the tunnel across the yard.

Hail cloth is sold by width. Buy it wide enough to clip to the frame with some slack for flapping, and replace it when the weave has gone brittle in the sun, which in this light can be a few seasons rather than a decade.

Shade percentage matters. A light hail cloth that also throws a little shade matches the CO-Horts observation that modest shade helps in this sun. A very dense shade cloth, the kind sold for a patio, will stretch leggy lettuce and delay tomatoes.

If the label is only “shade” and not “hail,” assume it is the wrong product until you know the weave can take an impact. Row-cover frost fabric is also the wrong summer skin. It excludes too much light if you leave it on, and it is not designed as a permanent roof.

Put the frame over the salad and berry beds first. If you have budget left, cover the tomato row, which loses leaves and green fruit in a direct hit and often recovers part of the crop if the stems stay intact. Leave the potato hills and the native-grass lawn outside.

The point is a harvest, not a covered estate. In a year with no hail, the frame still earns its place as a wind calmer and a light shade, which is why it should be built as a seasonal tool and not as an eyesore you resent and then fail to put up in May.

Checklist

Sources