[/media-credit]A hailstorm dumped these ping-pong-ball to pea-sized hail July 13, 2011, west of Loveland.
We had to know it would happen, sooner or later, somewhere — or somewhere else. It almost always does.
This time the freakish weather hit DIA, Boulder, and where I live in NoCo (Northern Colorado). I wasn’t there for the storm, and I didn’t even see these hailstones until I was walking a friend’s dog at their property. Being a friend, I snapped some photos in case they’d sustained any hail damage.
But their garden was pretty much fine, just fine, which tells me the hail was spotty and, though sometimes huge, not incredibly sustained. Then again, there were no squash, no melons, no cukes in their gardens. They have mainly xeric perennials, herbs, shrubs and snack veggies with smallish leaves — peas and the like — which tend to shrug off such storms. I haven’t yet had a chance to check on my own beets, beans and tomatoes in the backyard, or the beets, beans, tomatoes and peppers in a community plot I rent.
Hail doesn’t have to be the endgame.
As Grow designer Jacqueline Feldman wrote in 2009, veggie gardens can have amazing resilience. A few weeks after her square-foot garden was shredded that year, lettuce was re-germinating and she was back to harvesting — maybe not a feast, but something. In 2010, Grow contributor Jodi Torpey offered great tips for planting a hail-resistant garden — and replanting if you get hit.
Hail or not, I’ve learned the wisdom of low expectations. It’s a miracle if I can get anything out of a raised bed that I’ve been planning to tear out every year (and that my concrete contractor dumped his readymix into a couple of years back). I’ll have to wait until I’m done dog-sitting for my hail-hit friends to even find out what the storm’s wrath has wrought at my house. But … I suspect I’ll survive it. A few years of gardening teaches you to think in the long term. While spraining a shoulder in April meant that I whined and groused about being unable to get plants in the ground until early June, well, the chill rains meant that I wasn’t actually playing that much catch-up to smug early-bird gardeners. My few snap-pea plants grew tall and just finished bearing. My containers of coleus are singing “Feed me, Seymour.” And while my lettuce bed was an epic fail, the seeds I gave another friend went crazy, and they’ve pressed me into service to help them devour the salad-mix crop. For most gardeners and most locations, hail isn’t a disaster. It’s sure as heck no reason to give up. It’s not bindweed, or squash bugs, for cryin’ out loud.
Books in Bloom: If the idea of concocting your own fertilizer and soil tonic from stuff you have around the house — and using the recipe of a Colorado gardener who founded Beauty Beyond Belief and Bounty Beyond Belief seed companies — turns your crank, check out Don Eversoll’s book Secrets From My Grandma’s Garden. The little self-published book is full of gardener wisdom, practical tips and tricks and will tell you how to use Epsom salts and Coca-cola to grow killer tomatoes.
Don’s son is a chemistry teacher, and he’s been around the garden patch for decades, growing up in Nebraska, where they know from ag, becoming a PR and publications exec for years. Eversoll swears by a dash of Epsom salts to prevent blossom-end rot in tomatoes, and the Coca-cola in his formulas adds phosphorus. Eversoll had 2,500 of the books printed and is down to his last 500. His site has a list of the local garden centers that carry it, but if it’s on your list, you might call to make sure it’s not sold out. He said he’ll print more before winter.
