All Hail The Garden
After the biggest snowfall on record, and a last frost date that came at least a month early, last Friday brought the gnarliest-looking hailstones I’ve ever seen.
They were described as ‘quarter sized’ by the weather service. It’d be an exaggeration to say ‘golf ball sized’, but a number of the stones were flat and bumpy, and about the same size as sliced golf balls. The spherical stones were smaller, about the size of shooter marbles.
The storm made a huge racket, and lasted for several minutes, leaving the yard littered with ice balls and fallen debris.
Outside of a couple tomato and potato leaves, the garden came through the storm intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my Subaru.
We’ve seen some unusual weather since returning to the US, and the unseasonably hot & dry spring probably accounts for the failure of the lambs lettuce and spinach crops. Presuming that the mild spring would last, I planted some tomatoes and squash two weeks early, and as it turned out, I could have planted them a couple weeks earlier than that. This being my first year back in the garden, it was too much of a mess to start planting the first week of March (my excuse is that I was waiting until the pine trees came down), but even if I’d wanted to, there was still snow on the ground.
I wonder what summer is going to bring.