Gardening can turn into an expensive hobby, and since the fruits (and vegetables!) of your labour take a while to mature and be harvested, it makes sense not to spend excessively if you don't have to. Wind shields are something you could spend hundreds on...be it in the form of portable green houses, temporary wind shields or building an entire green house! I went for a simpler, cheaper option that was also available on the Sunday night that our strong winds hit...cling film and garden stakes!
The suffering seedling were my snow peas and cucumbers (sadly the cucumbers then succumbed to the over-watering from the rain that the strong winds brought with them). I simply snapped the garden stakes into thirds, stuck them into the ground about 30cm apart so that I could then tape on cling film creating a wind shield. The bonus is that it still lets the sun through to the seedlings too if your sun is very directional (mine is when it gets to my peas, they are against a west facing wall). It has worked well and the one pictured, although not the prettiest thing, has been in place for a couple of months now and, as you can see, the peas have grown up healthy and strong...they were only 5cm tall and very flimsy when they went out.
As a side note, they always say just to give peas (even these dwarf versions) garden stakes to climb up. I found that, with just the stakes, mine were still reaching out in all the wrong directions and climbing up each other (then weighing each other down and falling over!), so I just grabbed a piece of mesh I had left from building the cat run and strung this up between the posts....they are now happily climbing their way up that instead of falling over :-)
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