This post was originally just going to be a brief description of how the garden is going with some pictures, etc. I'll still post some pictures below because everything was looking great. I even posted on social media all my pictures because I was so excited. Later that evening, I got hit with a very powerful and unexpected hailstorm. Most of my tomatoes and peppers are gone. Some other plants are damaged, but they'll live. I've replaced everything in the hope that things will recover.
Unfortunately, this is the risk and reality of gardening and farming. If I had a much larger field or a farm on which I rely on for income, this could have been more devastating. Pap was a crop insurance adjuster for many years to assess the damage and reimbursement for farmers. I would go out with him to his assessments, and he was able to calculate in his head how much damage is done to a field of corn or an apple orchard and report this to the farmers. While I was aware these things happen to others, I never thought it would happen to me. I was mostly planning on finding ways to keep out pesky racoons and deer! I will say with all the rain we got with this storm (it hadn't rained in about 2 weeks), I won't have to water things for a while!
Here are a few before pictures that I had planned to include:
Just weeded the peppers and tomatoes section
Zucchini will take over everything!
Beets
And then here's some of the damage:
You can't tell from the pictures, but the water is at least flowing out of my fields and not standing. You can say things will be well watered!
Here's an "after" shot of everything replaced. You can see where the tomatoes (left side) got the most water as the ground as a slight dip. So far, so good!
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