Hail Damage Brings Big Changes
And my fledgling garden gets a fresh outlook
I’m not sure anyone’s ever totally prepared for a disaster, and sometimes even relatively minor ones can catch you off-guard.
We’re sure weren’t expecting the freak hailstorm that took the exterior of our house by surprise two weeks ago. Every year, it seems, the anecdotal reports of hail get larger and larger, size-wise. Personally, since I’d never witnessed hail much larger than a nickel, I had a hard time believing the hail chasers who called in to TV stations to claim golfball and (more recently) baseball sized stones.
I mean, you NEVER hear of anyone getting killed by hail, and if baseballs really came down forcefully from the sky, wouldn’t somebody somewhere get crushed?
Well, this hail was bigger than golfball sized and lasted for twenty minutes! And even though the temperature made it up to ninety degrees soon after the storm, five hours later we still had a layer of hail in our yard! It was by far the craziest hailstorm I’ve ever seen—-and it certainly took its toll in our neighborhood.
Essentially, the whole exterior of our house sustained enough damage that our homeowners insurance is paying, basically, for a whole new exterior. We’re springing for a new patio door, which did not get pelted but which needed to be replaced and there’s no time like the present.
A year ago, it would not have occurred to me to view my old French door as anything but trash. But these days, I look at everything with an eye toward identifying its hidden multiple purposes. And then, before consigning it to a landfill somewhere, I make an attempt to refashion it into something I actually need——and in the old days, might have spent money to acquire.
So guess what an old patio door with two big beautiful panes of glass and broken hardware looks like to me? That’s right! A cold frame for the garden!
I didn’t have the best of luck starting seeds inside this year, and rather than invest in grow lights, why not move the entire operation outdoors? I think my hubby can easily build the frame to go beneath the double-wide door and I’m excited to see how my shallow greenhouse pans out next spring.
Plus, no sooner did I lament the sorry state of my garden after the storm came through than we noticed the most darling pears on the two trees we planted four years ago! The pears kind of mimic the size and shape of the leaves at this point, so it’s hard to see them all. But I counted 21 so far, and that definitely renewed my enthusiasm for all things garden!
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