Miss A did a little garden dance as we planted the garden this week. She even wore her pumpkin socks under her pink boots for growing luck to her pumpkin seeds.
Miss E has a green thumb…for about four minutes at a time. She was very excited for garden planting, more excited than my dear husband. Miss E helped put in stakes for rows, planted some seed tape of lettuce, carrots and beets. She also planted sweet corn and green beans. Heavy seeding was her strategy and maybe a little spilling of seed. We might need to do some thinning once the plants come up in a week.
Tonight as I was uploading the above pictures it started to thunder outside. The girls were at Bible school. Hunter had just come inside from day two of summer baseball practice. Nathan came inside from a job he had been at and asked I could come help him finish cleaning out our soon to be for sale camper before the storm came. It started to rain as we went outside, good for the garden I thought since it needs some water. Then as I started to wipe down cabinets and Nathan was in our barn, I heard a “tink” on the camper. More pings, tinks and bangs. Nathan rang from the door of the barn into the camper. Then huge hail from the sky. For minutes. It seemed like forever. It was the largest hail storm I’ve seen. I captured some video on Nathan’s phone.
I will share more hail photos later this week and the video. Hunter called me from the house during the storm to tell me, “Don’t worry Mom. I’m taking pictures!” As the hail banged and bounced, my lumberyard owning, general contractor husband said, “Well, we are going to need to start ordering more shingles.”
The hail that fell tonight is the largest I’ve seen in my lifetime on the prairies of North Dakota. It would have shredded all crops in a month and beyond this summer. Even now, planting and seeding has been early this year and this is not good for farm fields. Crops were up, until tonight. It makes me not care or worry too much about our little garden tomatoes. Most importantly, we were safe and sound. Tonight I was clearly reminded what a gamble growing a garden or growing crops on a large scale can be. The weather can be perfect and then within a few minutes farmers can lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment in their biggest gamble they cannot control, Mother Nature. One thing about North Dakota and Mother Nature, it’s never dull around here.
What’s your favorite weather adventure?
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oh, i hate to hear that about the crops! i hope it will not be too widespread!
I hope your tomato plants made it through the hail. Looks really big and a lot. I planted some green beans last week and 4 more tomato plants. Hard to stop.
That is crazy about the hail. My mom said they’ve had record heat in Michigan.
Hope everything survived!
Thought of your family as we watched the radar that night. My husband’s corn and bean are all up, so luckily we didn’t get any hail this time in SE ND.