No, the picture is NOT a collection of our eggs. Early Friday morning, about 4:00 AM, we were both awakened by a huge commotion outside. Thinking of our animals we jumped up and raced to the window - even I, who can usually sleep through massive thunder! No it wasn't a coyote raid or hyped-up cars doing 360's in our back field. It was hail: hail like we've never seen here at Aagaard Farms. And not the usual two minutes; twenty minutes of pounding, clattering, shattering hail the size of some of our small eggs. Combined with hard, driving rain and stiff breezes, it was a douzy of an evening! We were up checking windows, patrolling the sun room to make sure didn't crack and watching the sheer magnitude of almost constant lightening. Farmer Boy grabbed these hail stones in the pictures after if finally let up, so they've washed away some from their original size.
Friday's damage report: not bad really. We expected much worse, we even delayed going outside when the sun did come up. But it really wasn't as anywhere nearly as bad as it could have been! The hoop house is perforated in about fifty places but the tomatoes and cabbage inside are fine. One plot of tomatoes at the far east of the gardens is ruined: it looks like somebody stomped on all of them. Another plot closer to the house just has a few broken branches. Some leaves broken or shredded in the winter squash patch and on some rows of potatoes, many raspberries knocked off but everything else looks pretty good. The rest of our season could have been over, just like that........
That's...wow...so glad that the damage wasn't more than you described...which is bad enough. Too bad about the hoophouse though...what kind of plastic do you have on it? 2 layers? Hail is horrible. Everytime those nasty looking clouds come up I think...here we go...been lucky so far, just one small brush with the ice from the sky about 4 or 5 weeks ago that left small holes in the chard, eggplants, etc. but no lasting damage.
ReplyDeleteThe house is a single layer of 6 mil. poly; it may become a two-layer by default now to fix it (which will improve it's insulating properties)! It has small rents, not big gaping holes - which we could consider air-conditioning.
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