Mother Nature is awesome!  Jacy called from the library to get our crew out of the field, and just as we were walking in to the barn, you could hear the violent roar of hail on cars and roofs approaching rapidly from the West.  Nothing to do but watch and pray for it to stop.  Afterward, the smell of onions hung in the air as we walked around surveying the damage, sucking on chunks of ice.  Tattered leaves lay at the base of their plants, and some lettuce heads looked like a tiny bomb had gone off directly underneath it, but most everything was still upright.  It was clear to see that we’d get through the damage from yesterday’s storm.  The golf ball sized hail sailed right through the plastic on the greenhouses, and the row cover protecting the brassicas is shredded.  Replacing those petro products all at once is a financial hit, particularly on top of the decrease in restaurant sales that we will see in response to less than perfect produce offerings.  All of the lettuces, spinach, kale, chard, and other leafy greens will show the scars from the hail.  All of the warm season field crops such as cherry tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and summer squash will take a few extra weeks to mature, and in the case of those marginal crops such as melons, sweet corn, and 100 day winter squash in a 100 day frost free microclimate, some may not mature at all.  However, we’ve seen this before, and if our field’s response to the early July 2008 hail storm is any indication, your CSA boxes will soon be overflowing with a bountiful harvest, and we’ll soon see those beautiful heirloom tomatoes, peppers, and long asian cucumbers from the greenhouses, still nutured by the perforated plastic covering them. 

 To all of this year’s CSA members and everyone else who keeps the orders coming, we want to say thank you for joining us in this endeavor and sharing the risks of feeding ourselves!