What I Learned About Life by Struggling with Row Covers on a Windy Day

Middletown, Maryland is the windiest place I’ve ever lived. By far. I’m not sure if it’s the whole town, nestled in the valley between the Catoctin Mountains and South Mountain, or just our little piece of it. But after the groundhogs, the wind has probably been the most surprising and frustrating challenge we’ve encountered in our first year of flower farming.

This fall, Dave and I planted three rows of cool season annuals, looking forward to the chance for earlier spring blooms and beginning the process of setting up our farm to be more of a year-round operation. Some seeds we started inside and transplanted into rows (snapdragons, sweet William, yarrow). Other flowers we direct seeded (poppies, Bells of Ireland). For all of our rows, we needed to cover them to protect them from birds, wind, and, yes, groundhogs, as they established themselves in the ground.

It was a windy day when we set up the hoops designed to create a low tunnel with the row cover material. (It had been windy all fall!) The 75-foot-long row cover was whipped around by the wind as we tried to lay it over the hoops and clamp it in place. We tried pulling the row cover tight, attaching it with a clip to the top of each hoop and then with clips along the side, pulling tight again, to create a tunnel. We worked section by section, trying to keep the row cover tight, but time after time, the material sagged down onto the rows and the wind kept pulling at the top clips.

Finally, out of sheer frustration and nothing else, Dave and I just weighted down the edges of the row cover with rocks and didn’t bother with the clips or pulling the cover tight. And as soon as we stopped fighting with the row cover, as soon as we just let go a little bit, the cover settled into place, gently blowing in the wind, sure, but creating a nice tunnel over our seeds and seedlings.

I realized we do this a lot in life—hold on tight to something, try to force something, try to tighten up everything and try and make it perfect. But, like the row cover, we all need a little room to breathe, and we need to allow ourselves a little flexibility in order to be able to serve our purpose and be our best.