Storm Aftermath and 12 July Harvest

We had severe thunder and lightening all night and heavy rain. When we got up is was a beautiful day and hot and muggy. Some pictures below show the damage.

This was dry before the storm so this was accumulated from about 17:30 to 08:00 the next day.

The black eyed peas, which are just filling their pods, got hammered. We staked them all up off the ground and will be able to salvage the crop.

The first planting of corn survived pretty well intact but the second planting had a lot of blow down as you can see. We staked them up as best we could and the plants themselves are fine so we should still get a good crop...it just wont look as good (the children of the corn will have to be awful short to get to us).

The hibiscus we were bragging about a couple of days ago got major damage....some of the broken stems are now gracing our kitchen table.

Todays harvest. The peppers and cabbage were planned to be harvested today and are all put up as freezer slaw or canned peppers. We ate the small number of beets (accidentally pulled up while weeding) tonight..BBQ'd along with some fresh corn and a couple of pork chops from a pasture raised hog....store bought pork is so full of water and so tasteless we cant stomach it anymore. And the green tomatoes were from one broken branch of a Cherokee Purple tomato plant. Yes they are huge, yes they will ripen on the kitchen counter, and yes they taste great. We have about 50 or 60 more tomatoes waiting to be harvested in various stages of ripening and more coming from succession plantings we ended up with because we dint know what we were doing....

And then the glorious weather we have come to love here.

The rain has greened everything up....that quick.

Note the hanging rainbow.

And the new roof worked great like it should.

You cant imagine the speed of the weather patterns here, the clouds zip by and storms roll in with a purpose that is almost shocking. Today we repaired what we could in the garden, weeded, put up some of our daily harvest, had a neighbor bring us some plum jelly, went to another farm and were offered all the wild plums and apples we could pick and we ended the day with a nice BBQ dinner. Tomorrow is a mortar and paint day...such is retirement.