Post by Lannie on Jul 19, 2008 12:27:33 GMT -5
Last night we had the mother of all thunderstorms run right over us. But Mother Nature being as she is, there wasn't a thing we could do about it but hunker down. Of course, I worried all night about the animals, but they're all fine. Our guinea hen sitting on eggs out in the ditch looks like a drowned rat, but bless her heart, she never got off her eggs. The Brahma hen that's in the lilac hedge had a much better time of it - she's in the thick stuff and probably only barely got wet.
And if it had just been rain, all would be well, but we had hail. It wasn't even really big hail - probably about the size of chickpeas, but it was coming down thick and fast. When it was all done, there was probably an inch of hail out on the road, and almost everywhere we looked, it was white. This morning I double checked all the critters and found no injuries or damage, then I went out to the garden. What a mistake.
Everything out there is flattened. Most of the tomato plants are still relatively upright, but they're missing a lot of branches, and I lost 99% of all the baby green tomatoes they were carrying. They're all over the ground out there. Sigh... The lettuce is completely flat and full of holes, as is the chard patch. There are dime-sized holes neatly punched through the sides of some of the containers I had stuff in out there. I have several seedling packs of replacements sitting in hard plastic shoebox-type things, and they're just full of bullet holes. All the seedlings are flattened, too.
It's going to take me days to clean up out there and truly assess the damages. I don't think anything was killed outright, but it's going to take a while for it to recover. And all those tomatoes gone! I'm just heartsick. What a mess. I put so much effort and care into my garden this year, and it was doing so well, and now it looks like a freaking war zone. Oh, well, that kind of thing happens, I guess. I can't really do anything until it dries out - this morning I kept sinking in the mud up to my ankles, so it will be a couple of days at least before I can really go out there and start the cleanup process.
It's truly a sad thing to lose the garden like this, but I'm very glad that none of the animals were hurt or killed. That would have been LOTS worse.
~Lannie
And if it had just been rain, all would be well, but we had hail. It wasn't even really big hail - probably about the size of chickpeas, but it was coming down thick and fast. When it was all done, there was probably an inch of hail out on the road, and almost everywhere we looked, it was white. This morning I double checked all the critters and found no injuries or damage, then I went out to the garden. What a mistake.
Everything out there is flattened. Most of the tomato plants are still relatively upright, but they're missing a lot of branches, and I lost 99% of all the baby green tomatoes they were carrying. They're all over the ground out there. Sigh... The lettuce is completely flat and full of holes, as is the chard patch. There are dime-sized holes neatly punched through the sides of some of the containers I had stuff in out there. I have several seedling packs of replacements sitting in hard plastic shoebox-type things, and they're just full of bullet holes. All the seedlings are flattened, too.
It's going to take me days to clean up out there and truly assess the damages. I don't think anything was killed outright, but it's going to take a while for it to recover. And all those tomatoes gone! I'm just heartsick. What a mess. I put so much effort and care into my garden this year, and it was doing so well, and now it looks like a freaking war zone. Oh, well, that kind of thing happens, I guess. I can't really do anything until it dries out - this morning I kept sinking in the mud up to my ankles, so it will be a couple of days at least before I can really go out there and start the cleanup process.
It's truly a sad thing to lose the garden like this, but I'm very glad that none of the animals were hurt or killed. That would have been LOTS worse.
~Lannie