Hail No!!

Tuesday afternoon, Sage and I were in Safeway with the kiddos stocking up on milk ($1.49/gallon--an outrageous re-opening deal that ran for the week--you could only get two at a time but I think I ended up with 8 gallons over the course of the week)when it started raining HARD--like flood-the-parking lot hard. Pretty soon the rain turned into nasty, yucky hail. Sage braved the elements to get the van and pull it up as close to the doors as possible so we could run in. The streets were pretty flooded in spots. But the first thing that came to my mind when the hail hit was "Oh no! I hope it's not getting mom and dad's house because it will shred the garden!" (Which happened last year). I called my dad only to find out that there were 3 inch piles of hail in some areas! =o =o =o So I was sickened by the news. When we got home, I had to snap a couple of pictures and even though they don't give the storm nor the damage justice, it's the best I got!

This would be the bbq grill that was picked up by the wind and moved to this spot where the hailed nestled nicely in.



I wish this picture picked up better on the poor plant casualties but the corn was shredded, the beans are naked of their alot of their leaves and I think all the blossoms, the cucumbers were a total fatality, the peas did okay except there was a loss of pods and those already there got pretty pocked up.



The tomatoes REALLY took a hammering!



And this shows some of the hail piles! (or as Aubrey yelled, "Snow!")



It is just so disheartening when you baby the little plants along through frost and snow in spring and you just pray that the growing season will be long enough to get a good harvest and then in 15 minutes (or more like 5 minutes of hail time) all your hard work is laughed at by nature. But as was pointed out, at least we are not flooded out of our homes and livelihoods. I think all in all, we should have some good recovery although it will slow things down quite a bit.