Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
Listening to the rain. Much needed and welcome rain, thinking it was soaking in around the tomatoes, basil, carrots, peppers, and squash in the garden at Plot 63 at Roseville Community Garden. I did a lot of that on Wednesday afternoon, and prayed it would help bring the latest nasty heat wave to and end. It did, but at a heavy price.
At 1 pm, it was 102-degrees at the Alpine School in Sparta, and 98-degrees at the Andover-Aeroflex Airport – both less than five miles from my home and Plot 63 at Roseville Community Garden. By 4:30 pm, the temperature would be 74 degrees.
At 3:00 pm, all hell had broken loose with the weather in North Jersey – it was a lightning storm unlike any I had witnessed in the 15 years that I lived here, with so much lightning that the thunder literally NEVER ended for almost an hour. At times, there were 5 or 6 lightning strikes a minute, many in plain sight from my dining room window. You know, the kind where you see and hear (and feel!) the thunder and lightning at the exact same instant, and the crash reverberates in your chest.
Intense rains fell at a rate of 2-inches per hour at times (the local rain gauge at Lake Mohawk indicated almost 3-inches total in the two hour period). And according to reports, quarter-size hail and 55-mile-per-hour winds hit Sussex County.
It hit Plot 63, and all the other plots at Roseville Community Garden for that matter. When it was all over, all of us who had toiled so hard in our 15-foot x 15-foot patches of heaven had learned a lesson of what it’s like for the farmers who grow the food we so often take for granted, and whose lives and families depend on the meager existence that they work from the soil.
It ain’t easy. And the weather means more, when you have a garden.
When I pulled up to the barn this morning to check on the garden, I just wanted to cry. The pictures below speak for themselves.
The standard view of Plot 63 that you’ve become accustomed to seeing in my weekly updates, morning of July 20, 2012. This time, things aren’t looking quite so good.
I’ll do some more blogging later this weekend – I’ve got to get busy and make plans to replant – too much of the summer season left to waste time pouting or feeling sorry. But those fresh Jersey tomatoes are looking like they are going to have to come from somewhere else this year. Thank goodness for local farmers markets. Click on any of the pictures for larger images.
The tomatoes were shredded by quarter-sized hail.
Most of the smaller green tomatoes and new blooms were stripped from the plants, but even the large, ripening fruit was exploded by the wind-driven quarter-sized hail.
Hundreds of tomatoes litter the ground throughout the garden. These were my yellow plums.
The crisp Romaine lettuce became a pile of mushy green leaves – this is a one-week different comparison of the same head of lettuce. Sad.
The butternut and acorn squash, cucumbers and zucchini were all shredded and fruits knocked off vines – I pulled the plants this afternoon and hope to replant something there over the weekend.
The pepper plants lost at least 2/3rd of their leaves and all young fruit, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that perhaps some of them will keep growing and produce some peppers this year.
Here are a couple of additional shots of other gardens devastated by the storms that raced through Sussex County New Jersey on Wednesday, July 18, 2012:
More Roseville Community Garden sadness.
A children’s patch, planted with pumpkins for the fall, looking shredded and sad at the Roseville Community Garden.