Sorry about the multiple posts. I will figure it out eventually

Ha Ha! Which one do we answer? I will try this one! I have stacked bricks and blocks and hay bails on the upwind side of very new seedlings. At night I have covered them with buckets. My Granddad always saved milk jugs. He would cut the bottom out and throw away the lid. Then set the jug over the plant and pull up soil to hold it there. Large tin cans work to. I have also went to the trouble to stake and tie every limb and leaf on a plant before. 1 pepper plant had about 8 little stakes on it! Right now I have 2 little pepper plants that are kinda floppy in the pots so I put a toothpick stake right next to them and clamped them to it with clothespins. It works! Chopsticks would work with a larger plant. Mostly what I do now though is grow my own from seed and make sure they are completely hardened off and tolerant of the wind we get every spring.

Mostly I use floating row cover over hoops. The hoops go over each raised bed as soon as it is planted. That way, if any sort of weather hazard is threatening and I am at home, all I have to do is throw the row cover over each bed, weigh down the edges and ends of it and the plants are protected from whatever is coming: strong wind, frost, freezing or sub-freezing temperatures, hail, sleet or snow.....just about anything.

Before I invested in floating row cover, I used old bed sheets, blankets or tarps the same way. I also used rolls of 6 mm sheet plastic (the lighterweight sheet plastics don't hold up as well as the 6 mm). I also have used cardboard boxes, buckets, clay flower pots, baskets, etc., with bricks or large rocks on top to hold them in place, although it has been almost a decade since I last did that. I think I bought my first floating row cover about a decade ago. At first I had only one piece of row cover, bought in a flat pack at a nursery in TX and used it for frost/freeze protection. Once I saw how well it worked, I bought more and more. Our weather is so erratic that anything we can do to get the plants through a bad weather day is worth it.

Like Scott, I prefer to raise almost all my plants from seed because that let's me grow them under conditions that strengthen them, and then I can pick my own schedule, harden them off properly and not put them in the ground until they are strong enough to tolerate just about anything Mother Nature throws at them. For example, if you keep a fan running in the room where you're raising seedlings, that helps them learn to cope with wind movement. (It also helps prevent diseases.) If you harden them off in a way that they get some wind exposure (and I mean some significant wind exposure) before they go into the ground, they are stronger and sturdier and have more tolerance for strong wind.

Cabbage is a cool-season plant that is pretty tough, though strong winds can burn the edges of the leaves if they encounter that wind very early in their young lives. Be sure you plant them deeply so that there isn't any of the stem/stalk showing. I have noticed, particularly with purchased seedlings, that there often is an inch or more of stem showing above the soil line and then the leaves begin. If I purchased (or raised) a plant like that, I'd bury the whole stem beneath the surface of the soil to reduce how much the plant will move. That will help.

With tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, I stake the plants the day they go into the ground. The stake used depends on the size of the plants. I attach the plants to the stakes loosely (so the zip ties or twice used won't cut into the plant stem as it grows). I want the plants stablized enough that a strong wind won't snap them in half, but loose enough that they can grow. It is the exposure to the wind that actually makes the stems stronger, so I don't overprotect by tying young plants too tightly to the stakes. I want them to move enough that the plants feel the wind and grow stronger stems.

How much wind protection a plant needs will vary depending on the age and size of the plant, the microclimate in which it is being grown, whether trees, shrubs, wooden privacy fences or structures are serving as a wind-break, etc. The more exposed a garden is to wind, the more you'll need to provide protection.

For the winds this week, with winds up to 45 mph in the forecast, I didn't do anything for the plants in the ground. All the cool-season plants in the ground have been there pretty much since mid-February or latest February, so they have had time to grow, enlarge and strengthen. When I looked at them late yesterday (right before it hailed), they looked fine. For the plants in flats that I am growing and hardening off, I let some of them sit outside until noon. They had very little wind protection, but they did have soon. The winds in the morning were only in the 20s and 30s. At noon I moved them into the greenhouse which sheltered them well. I had the doors and vents on the east and west ends open for air flow so the greenhouse and plants wouldn't overheat (we eventually hit 87 degrees at our house yesterday, right before the thunderstorms started popping up). My plants already had been exposed to a lot of wind previously, so with the winds in the 20s and 30s, they were fine. No sign of damage. Had we been expecting wind in the 40s or 50s, I still would have left the plants outside for as long as possible as they need wind exposure in order to grow stronger.

If I'd had very tiny plants in the ground that I recently transplanted or that recently popped up from seed, I likely would have throw a very lightweight row cover over them to break the wind. Your shade cloth should have broken the wind pretty well, unless you were having wind gusts at 50 mph or over, in which case it would depend on the density of the shade cloth.

My dad used to cut the bottoms off No. 10 cans (the very large institutional cans) he got from the lunch ladies at our school cafeteria and put one can around each tomato and pepper plant at transplant time. He would work 2 or 3 inches of the can into the ground to anchor it firmly. I know people who have done the same thing with milk jugs, 5-gallon buckets and buckets of other kinds, like cat litter buckets. With the No. 10 cans, Dad would leave the cans in the ground until the plant was growing up above the top of the can and then he'd remove them so they wouldn't damage the plants.

I did not have row cover over the plants yesterday, but I didn't fret about the hail coming. About a month ago, when we did have a forecast that included very large hail, I attached bird netting to all the hoops over the hoop-covered beds, using zip ties. Once I put the bird netting on the hoops, I leave it there until sometime in May.....removing it whenever the plants get so big that they are pushing against the netting. Hail that is small enough to make it through the holes in the bird netting likely will not damage the plants. Hail that is larger just hits the netting and bounces off. I've only done this for 3 or 4 years now, but it gives me great peace of mind. Before I started using bird netting over hoops, I worried and fretted over hail damaging my garden (which has happened, but well over a decade ago, so the painful memories are somewhat fading now). Now, I just don't have to worry about it, which is a good thing, because here in OK it seems like the chance of hail is in just about every forecast that includes rain from February through June. We got two rounds of hail last night, and the first was only pea-sized to marble-sized, and the second was said to be up to nickle sized, but the ones I could see from inside the house were only about dime-sized. I expect no damage to any of the plants in the garden, including those not covered by hoops (sugar snap peas on a trellis, and spinach growing in the rest of the sugar snap pea bed).