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HAIL!!!!

F

fisting_mayfield

So it hailed yesterday. It wasnt too bad, but bad enough to shred my plants :(

The worst hit was my tasmanian hab, and my Bhut Halokia.

Shredded leaves aplenty!

The worst part is, i got pelted with hail while trying to rescue them, but it looks like the damage has been done.

I'll upload some photos soon
 
yea yea I know what you're going through, it bummed me out too when I saw the hail coming down but I didnt go outside to get them because it was close to golfball size hail coming down (for me)& I was in no mood to get pelted :lol: so I just hoped for the best.

most of my plants lost leaves, several lost branches. my worst hit where the congo trinidad & for a northern climate they still came back & produced, maybe not as much but still not much difference from the other plants I was growing just a later harvest time which isnt that bad IMO

I've thought (thats as far as I got :lol:) about building some kind of screen/stand thats overhead of the potted plants since it'd be a small enough area to make something like that.
 
fisting_mayfield said:
So it hailed yesterday. It wasnt too bad, but bad enough to shred my plants :(
Click to expand...

Oh no!

There are a lot of things you can plan and protect your plants from, but hail? Especially since y'all are in such serious drought; the lat thing you would want to do is prevent rain from getting to them.

We haven't had anything but the lightest of hail storms around here in years. As a matter of fact, I don't remember one that did any damage since I was a child.


The worst hit was my tasmanian hab, and my Bhut Halokia.

Shredded leaves aplenty!

The worst part is, i got pelted with hail while trying to rescue them, but it looks like the damage has been done.

I'll upload some photos soon
Click to expand...

Yes, pictures are good! Remember, though, peppers are resilient! They'll come back even bushier, and that might even out the delay in producing. Wasn't it Devil Duck who was hit by hail late in the season? And he still got a good enough crop to make up some of his sauce.
 
Yeah, I got hit pretty good back in August, I think. Lots of TLC helps. If the damaged leaves turn yellow, go ahead and pick them off. Everything else will eventually fall off, but new growth will eventually come back in and the plants will be very bushy.

I had a good late season run of peppers, but my mid-season was in the crapper.
 
That's not good fisting_mayfield!! I didn't get any at work, but I just remembered, mum said we got a bit at home. I should go and check, although apparently we barely got any at all. I'm more worried about my plants getting diseased with all this rain we are having this week :(

And Pam, as for the drought, the rain is extremely coastal, so it doesn't help at all for the drought. This time of year is the storm season. It will be hot in the day, then in the afternoon, big thunderstorms roll in, often with some hail.

p.s. fisting_mayfield, just be thankful the hail wasn't like what we had 2yrs ago with tennis ball sized hail everywhere. Your plants would definately be dead! And if you tried to save them, you probably would be too :) I remember that day! Half the cars driving on the road had no windscreens lol :o! You probably missed out on that actually, you're a bit further North than I am :)
 
Hardware cloth (1/2 inch square mesh wire) works wonders for keeping birds out and hail off of plants. I made a frame over my tomatos this year to keep the birds out and covered it with hardware cloth. I did not lose a single tomato to the birds this year. I had no hail but I can not throw a baseball through it.
 
AJ,

It ain't the birds or bees that hurt my tomatoes, it's the squirrels. And with a 40x6 sq./ft. growing area for them, that's a lot of chicken wire.

I wish I could them like my uncle - his plants that seemed to be the runts of the crop were still well over six feet tall! I've seen picture were they were well over his head (by a foot or more) and he was 6'3".

Not to hijack this thread, but this year I'm thinking about something like trellis gardening for the green beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. I have four rows that are framed with 2x4s that are about six feet tall (the other two feet are in the ground!) that I can run a wire. I can run a wire from one side to the other, then twine down from the wire to the ground. Use velcro to tie the plants/vines to the twine.

And as long as I'm off-topic, what about the idea of digging a trench to put the containers in? They will be thin, black plastic (like the kind one gets large plants in at a Garden Store) so they will draw a lot of heat, especially in the dead of summer. I don't really expect a summer like last year (it was above 90 degrees 40 out of 45 days, and above 100 seven days), but even temps in the high 80s with bright sunlight will bake stuff. I have a good rotary tiller so it wouldn't be hard to rake out 120' of trench, but the containers at least partially in them, then rake the dirt back along the sides. The pots are about one foot tall, so I figure a trench eight inches deep should work well.

Opinions?
 
wordwiz - I use concrete wire mesh thats held up by conduit (1 single row) for cucumbers to grow on, as they grow I just push the vines through the mesh. also it works great for making cages for chiles/tomatoes. the mesh isnt really a mesh its just metal wire with about 6" openings plenty of room for your hand & a tomatoe to go through.

what you mentioned it sounds like more work & using wood which will just rot over time, not to mention velcro never heard of people using velcro in their garden.
 
Velcro is great. It is about an half inch wide and comes in 10-25 ft. rolls. It's easy to cut and I use it instead of string or cloth to tie plants to a stake. It's also easy to undo and tie back a little higher up the plant.

Yeah, the lumber will rot in about three years or so - I just had the eight of them laying around. They were left over a couple of years ago when a contractor had to replace part of my roof because of a storm. Too warped and cured to use for anything, except for driving in the ground!

I like the idea of growing cucumbers vertically, as they can take up a bunch of ground space. Hopefully, they will also ripen better. Do you, by chance, have a picture of your set-up?

This summer, I went for quantity of veggies (trying to help the local county fair) but next year I want quality. Gone are the mustard, kale, and most of the bell pepper plants. Instead of 60 tomato plants, I'll have 30.

Tentative list (with number of rows):
The tomatoes - 2
Hot Peppers - 4
Carrots, Beets, Onions - 1/3 ea.
Cucumbers, Zucchini - 1/2 ea.
Potatoes - 1
Green Beans - 1
Squash, Eggplant, Bell Peppers
Broccoli, Peas - 1/3 and 2/3 (Followed by Grean Beans as a second crop)

By spring, I'll probably come up with a couple more things I want to plant, especially some spices.
 
Pishk said:
just be thankful the hail wasn't like what we had 2yrs ago with tennis ball sized hail everywhere. Your plants would definately be dead! And if you tried to save them, you probably would be too :) I remember that day! Half the cars driving on the road had no windscreens lol :o! You probably missed out on that actually, you're a bit further North than I am :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, we got that! the gf's car is still all dented!

The weather is pretty hectic atm, I know the chilies will grow back, but its the downtime thats killing me!!!
 
Thought it was my turn today...got so dark at 3 pm I had to turn the house lights on. It didn't miss us by much, lots of reports of damage around town.

Speaking of cars...those little rice bubble shaped things have the windshield as part of the structural strength. If it gets broken by hail the roof will sag before you can get it fixed & the car is written off.
Gotta love progress :P
 
gotta love insurance!!! get a windscreen smashed in... get a new car!!!!

Yeah the east coast is hectic atm, its so bloody hot here by day, then the black/blue clouds roll in and its battle stations!!!.

The chilies love the hot, humid weather tho... But my hab keeps dropping flowers!
 
Must have been 35 C here before the clouds came through, I went down to Bunnings & scored a few metres of shade cloth & a heavy duty staple gun. Leaned two 4 x 2 hardwood stumps against the wall of the house & stapled the cloth between them.
Enough room under there to fit a card table with all my young plants & covers them from the midday sun. Maybe a little hail protection too.

 
i like to harden them to hot weather...but kind of defeats the purpose when their leaves are being burned off. The established plants are loving it though.
 
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