Latest Thunderstorm Shots

Here are thunderstorm pictures from late May. The dark sky shots were from a storm that barely clipped us. Amazingly it hardly sprinkled. The later pictures are from the 96 degree day with golf ball size hail and lightning striking a rainbow that I wrote about here. I was so lucky to get that lightning shot. Thank you Sudi-Pie for finding the rainbow or I would have missed both.

Later on in the evening we saw near-continuous horizontal lightning very far away. I took a gig of video. This weekend I’ll edit that to show the lightning branching out in slow motion. I think there will be 3 or 4 really cool sequences.

4 comments

Vegetable Garden Update

Here are some pictures we took about a week ago. Just try to imagine everything a little bigger. The sunflowers are about half way up the fence as of now. A couple are starting to grow flowers (I think) and the biggest one will probably be near the top of the fence in a week or two. Our radishes are ready, we have about 30 tomatoes, the cucumbers are flowering and some of the peppers are starting to show up. The green onions don’t grow as fast as I thought they would but they are thickening up. Homegrown radishes are spicer than the store bought ones.

4 comments

The Day After Yesterday

I surveyed the wind and hail damage from yesterday. We only lost two tomatoes out of about 30 and possibly one sunflower out of about 20, but I’m seeing if its half-severed trunk will fuse back together. The others had their leaves pierced and a few were ripped off, but I’m sure they’ll be standing straight and tall again after a week of sunshine like last time. A periodic hail storm might even be a good thing. It sort of showed me which leaves to thin out and also provided some good soft organic matter for our compost bin.

I found our heavy-duty back doormat flipped over 10 feet away along with a sandwich bag and a tin foil dispenser. We didn’t lose any shingles and the pansies (they’re supposed to be dead by this time anyway) have again proven absolutely indestructible. Not too shabby!

3 comments