Garden 2009

Last year when we were in West Virginia, we heard wonderful stories of the huge amounts of strawberries and peaches our garden was producing. We got home in November, and ever since I've looked forward to having a garden again after two years without. Spring started in a promising way with lovely rhubarb and lots of blossoms on the fruit trees. I was happy to plant the various seeds, tomato plants, cucumbers, etc. The seeds were just starting to come up when the first of three horrendous hail storms came in a period of a week or so. The picture below was taken a full 12 hours after the first hail storm. Even after that much time, a pile of hail was still stacked on the lawn! Needless to say, we were worried about hail damage.



Our once healthy rhubarb looked more like green lace. It was all shredded by the hail. The strawberry flowers all got knocked off, so no strawberries this year.



One of the tomato plants died as did one of the cucumbers. The rest were badly damaged and took quite a while to recover. Most of the fruit forming on the trees was knocked off. In addition, one of the apple trees looked really sick. At first we thought it was hail damage, but as time went on, the leaves fell off and it eventually died. We found out it had fire blight. From all appearances, the other apple tree and the pear tree probably also have fire blight, so may die next year. Thankfully the peach trees are not prone to that. Then the rain started. It rained the whole month of June. Maybe we should have planted rice in the garden since it looked more like a rice paddy. Looking at the aftermath, I could see the likelihood of very little produce coming out of that garden as the seeds and seedlings were washed away. Eventually the rain stopped. To my amazement, most of the beans survived as well as a few of the carrots and beets. Eventually we replanted carrots and beets, but they didn't have time to get very big. As you see below, the carrots that didn't get washed away, outdid themselves! (That is a regular table knife on the middle carrot.)



The beans that started out fairly scanty apparently felt the need to make up for their slow start. I probably picked 25-30 gallons of beans eventually. The tomatoes also tried to make up for lost time. From our 8 tomato plants we ended up with about 4 bushels of tomatoes. We did end up with half a bushel of peaches, though they were damaged by the hail.

It does feel good to have our freezer and storeroom full again. Hopefully next year the gardening will be better.