Lost my whole basil crop to one windy afternoon on the 6th floor
I keep my pots on a south facing balcony in Chicago and last Tuesday we got gusts up to 40 mph. Came home from work and my two biggest basil pots were face down on the concrete, dirt everywhere, stems snapped clean off. I lost about 18 plants that I'd started from seed back in March. Spent an hour sweeping up soil and trying to save what I could, but only three little stems made it. Now I've got bungee cords hooked to the railing and I'm weighing down every pot with rocks. Anyone got a better system for keeping pots upright when the wind picks up?
Back in 2019 I had this exact thing happen with tomatoes on a third floor balcony in Milwaukee, except mine was a hail storm in July that shredded everything in like four minutes. What finally worked for me was those big flat saucers underneath the pots with heavy paver bricks sitting right on top of the soil around the base of each plant. The brick keeps the pot from tipping and the saucer catches water so you're not dripping on the people below. It looks ugly as hell but I didn't lose a single plant the rest of that summer.