We survived Hurricane Dorian! 2

Last Saturday, Hurricane Dorian brought his energy to Atlantic Canada.

We were nervous in preparation for it. All week leading up to it we tried our best to secure as much as we could, though you never know what might happen.

Saturday was a market day and some people expressed surprise that we were there.

But we had a lot of veggies and flowers that couldn’t go unharvested or unsold. This is how we make our whole livelihood – each week is important to us.

We tried to set up our stand to make it as easy and quick to break down as possible. We also pre-made all our bouquets the night before in case of high winds and rain.

For most of the day at the market it was fairly calm. A lot of customers came out early and so it didn’t end up being too different in terms of sales. We are so grateful that people still came out in force!

Our drive home was a bit windy, but there weren’t many vehicles on the road.

The hurricane really got going in the night.

The wind was just smashing against the house which made it pretty much impossible to sleep. I didn’t really fall asleep until the morning, when it was calmer.

In terms of damage on the farm, our wash station got mangled and one of our caterpillar tunnels was damaged (the other one that was up came out just fine). Our greenhouses were totally fine as well luckily.

Some row covers got torn and blown off crops.

A lot of plants got really tossed around. Many of the sunflowers got pushed sideways. Some of the zucchini plants got topped, with the wind ripping off the top half.

We don’t sell apples from our farm, though we really felt for those who do because our apple trees lost so many of their apples.

There was about 3 inches of rain, though that was fine for us as our fields are not in a flood zone and we’ve been working hard to keep as much of the soil covered as possible with plants to help with rain infiltration during fast rain events like this one.

We lost power Saturday afternoon (soon after we returned from market) and it predicted to be off until Wednesday night, though we were lucky and it came back on Tuesday.

Since we have only a landline phone (and no cellphones) we were glad that our landline wasn’t affected though the line must have gotten disturbed as crews were working on power lines and clean up because we lost phone service all day Tuesday.

Overall, we felt remarkably lucky – it could have been much worse.

And we felt both grateful for the ways that we have been able to prepare for events like this and for the opportunity to think of other things that might help for future hurricane scenarios. We made a little outdoor stove for cooking and our hand-crank radio was a huge help too.