Hail and Resilience - June 12, 2020

Let's start with the good news! Although it was overcast early in the week, we were able to rescue our carrots, get through weeding the newest salad greens, and quite a few of our onion beds (you can see kohlrabi at one end of them in the photo above). As the thunderstorm was rolling in on Friday afternoon, Amanda and I were able to weed the long greenhouse, prune and train tomatoes, and replace basil plants that were felled by cutworms (it's looking good in there!). Unfortunately....

The thunderstorm turned into a couple of minutes of marble-sized hail. It was intense! With a heaviness in my gut, I went out to survey the damage when the worst of it had passed. It was bad. It is bad. Buuut, plants are incredibly resilient, so most will recover -- they've just been set back a bit.

On my way back to the packing shed, I ran into Tristan just coming back from picking up our daughter from Grandpa Don's. Tristan was laughing. You can tell he grew up farming and these kinds of setbacks don't seem to phase him. I eventually came around to laugh with him, but, geesh, tomato transplant spaces shouldn't be brimming with hail pellets.

Update from June 19: The flattened brassicas above have bounced back for the most part. Tomatoes and zucchini also seem to be doing fine, however our greens are thrashed, wow. Our very gracious CSA members accepted beet greens and spinach that looked raggedy, however tasted as delicious as ever! It was the first box this week and what a memorable one it was.