Garden is destroyed
 

We had a bad hailstorm on Monday, and it has destroyed all the tomato and pepper plants. We had tomatos the size of baseballs just starting to turn a little orange, and now they have holes blasted in them. They were all looking so healthy, and growing and blooming and making more tomatos...sigh.

Also dinged up DH's new truck. Called the insurance co and have an appt tomorrow afternoon to meet with adjuster. Noticed today that the outside central air conditioner unit is dinged up also, and we may have roof damage as well. I think I'll get a roofer to check the house before filing a claim on that. Hail was the size of golfballs.

Oh well....life goes on....but we were sure salivating over those tomatos.

g'nite all, and God Bless

Dianne

That's awful!

We've had our plants scorched this year and then gully washed out. It's very sad seeing your hard work get leveled in a few minutes.

I hope that your roof is OK and that you can salvage some of the plants.

Lynda

Well, so far in my area we haven't had hail any bigger than a large shell-pea, but with climate change, who knows.

The whole idea of ice-rocks bombarding you from the sky sounds like an episode of the twilight zone--creepy!

We had some very strong winds today. Quite a few of my herb plants actually toppled over in the very strong winds, bent right over at ground level. Some I think broke the stalk. The tomato plants seem to have held up quite well, as did the pepper plants. I think some of my watermelon, acorn squash, butternut squash, and muskmelon were damaged somewhat by the the wind. Hopefully they'll all make it. Pickles/Cucumbers look ok.

I'm a bit concerned about some of the dwarf apple trees, some seem to have taken quite a beating.

It could have been worse though. Hail has missed us so far.

If you have to submit the damage to your homeowners insurance, ask the adjuster to include the lost garden in with the damage if possible. Many policies provide coverage for more than just the house and contents.

We do get strong winds here too. Last year they knocked over all my sunflowers mid-bloom. This year they haven't been that strong yet. But we've had a lot of steady mid-range wind, so I'm sort of hoping the plants have rooted/stalked themselves to be more wind resistant than last year when it was mostly calm except for the windy days.

I keep hearing more and more about people's cottage gardens and crops getting wiped out, and very few stories of successful harvest (someone's got a bumper crop of 'taters down in the Garden forum though). So I'm getting a bit worried about food prices. Um, more worried, that is.

Dianol- sorry to hear that. We have had hail three times this year but thankfully I got my garden in late due to the freezing weather we had so nothing got damaged. I think that this is going to be a stormy year this year.

I'm sorry to hear that, Dianne. I know the insurance can't help with your garden but hope everything else works out ok for you.

Brandon

Sorry to hear about this. I hope you can salvage some of the garden and have time to replant for a Fall garden.

Dianol, My son's garden was hit hard last year with hail and the tomatoes looked terrible but they recovered and they had a wonderful year for them. Some zuchinni's I think needed replacing.

Dianol, could you find any use for the tomatoes as they are now? Is there not recipe that calls for unripe ones?

Fried green tomatoes
green tomato mincemeat
for a few

Where was this storm..we got some rain on Sunday afternoon...but it was sunny and hot here within a few hours and nothing on Monday..we are in the NW corner. Sorry to hear about your garden...too much work...can you claim it with your insurance fellow? I know you can claim losses in freezers when power goes out...why not veggie gardens?

Not unusually had a bad hail storm some years back in TX. My little dog, called into the house, hesitated because she was getting smacked by the hail and thought she was doing something bad in walking toward me- took a good bit of coaxing to get her in poor thing. DH and DD were out riding bikes. I drove about seeking them unsuccessfully- they were in the ditch him sheltering her body with his, the hail stones bouncing off their helmets and his poor back.

Man, that is so disappointing.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...pshakehead.gif Losing trees, plants and flowers is tough. We put time in, watch it grow, sometimes from a little seed.

As far as insurance goes, just right that off. When the barn got destroyed in a bad storm last June I asked the insurance guy about all the plants that I had growing around it that were killed because, well because there was a barn sitting on them now LOL. He told us that none of that is covered. In fact even if you lose trees they are not covered. And if you have lots of downed limbs from trees and limbs broken off up in trees they do not cover having someone come out and clean it up or fix the trees. They said if a tree falls on your house or another covered building they will pay to have someone remove it from the house/building. But that is it, they will just take it off and then the rest is up to you. Amazingly some of the plants came back, even though they were under cement block and barn walls etc. for months. I think I only lost 2 honeysuckle vines in fact....and I keep looking in their spots thinking Maybe just maybe they will still comeback.

I hope your plants can manage a comeback.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1.../chores006.gif And I hope the bad storms stear around you for a while!

Thats terrible I feel for you I really do and that is one thing I had not thought of to worry about.
Now I have to worry about hail damage I already am at war with the squirrels, deer, rabbits, and more trying to fence the varmints out of my food plots LOL :)
Now I have to worry about things falling from the sky.
I wish you well I know what it is like to put all your time and energy into growing those little seedlings into full mature plants and all the time weeding, watering, checking for pest, etcetc only to have them destroyed.

I could be next. I am looking out at some really ugly black clouds and it is starting to thunder and it got real quiet out there. I am hoping we don't get hail but according to the weather map we are at about 100% chance.. What is it with this year??

So sorry about your garden. Maybe some of the plants can be salvaged. I had one damaged and thought it was gone, but it perked right up and is really doing well now. Green tomato pickles are delicious, too. They are served here in most catfish restaurants.

Paintlady, the way things have been going lately, a 100% chance of hail predicted for your area by the NWS is a virtual guarantee of your safety from hail damage.

Hail in our area is not shockingly unusual, but thankfully it's all been marble sized or smaller so far. Back in 1981, I lived in the Dallas area. It hailed - and the hail was the size of bricks, the kind you clad houses in!!! The din in the house from it hitting the roof was deafening - I called my husband at work and couldn't hear him on the phone!

And yes, we had major hail damage to the roof. Some folks in Fort Worth were dodging the hail INSIDE their living rooms! I had a friend that was driving when it hit and it knocked the windshield out of her car and she was scared to death, needless to say. Some guy ran out to "collect" this record sized hail. It killed him. (Some people just don't stop to think...)

Several years later we lived in the country, about thirty miles from where I am now. Our friends at church who lived about 12 miles away had a horrible hail storm. It stripped all the leaves off the trees around them, and killed almost all the birds that lived around there. They paid their son who was about 12 a nickel apiece to go around and collect them up and put any that were suffering out of their misery. I think he filled up a wheelbarrow just with the birds in the couple acres around their house.

So, hail happens in this neck of the woods - unrelated to global warming. (Remember it was just a few years before this happened they were wringing their hands over global cooling!)

Believe me.. I'm so very sympathetic about the loss of your garden.. especially the tomatoes! There's nothing like your own. Hope you can get started again soon.

HSH

I've had severe hail damage to gardens on at least 2 occasions after tomato ripening nicely on the vine in August. The hail basically stripped all the plants of leaves down to a stalk and damaged just about everything to an unusable stage, except for compost.
What the hail didn't kill, the wind came along and blew down the rest of the standing sweet corn. It was too late to replant for this climate. Very disheartening.

When big hail comes does it start off as little hail that gets bigger and bigger or does it go from dry or rain to HAIL and then back?

The hail we got twice that I remember, which did severe vehicle damage on a wide local scale here, it came suddenly and was golf ball sized or bigger...not small! The severity from damage was the fact it lasted so long. It hailed steady for something like 15 minutes. Once on the lake when that happened, it filled the boat that was docked to where it sunk.

Happened to me too. I had just set my seedlings out that morning. That afternoon we had a 10 minute storm with marble size hail. Not all that big and bad except it turned my seedling to mush. I had been babying these in the house since the end of Feb. VERY discouraging, I know. My sympathies.

Okay. So its cloudy and windy and then you get HAIL (not hail) and then everything is mucked up.

That sucks.

I just got hit tonight. Holes in the all the leaves of the various plants, tomato plants down, corn leaning... argh!

I hope you planted a big garden because I am hungry! :)

I think mine will survive this year. I had one last year that complete wiped it out. You couldn't even tell where stuff was except for the standing sticks that used to be corn... baseball size.

This one was pea to nickel size (by measuring the holes in the leaves).

There are cells dropping tennis-ball sized hail out there headed towards the Carolinas as I type.

Condolences on the garden. We can sure relate! Three nights of unseasonably late frost last week killed all the peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes I had started from seed. Seven varieties of peppers! (I love peppers.) It's too late to start more from seed, since our first frost can be expected mid-September, so I spent yesterday morning planting seedlings my wife bought at the store. Not much of a variety, but better than nothing.