Counting Those Chickens

How happy I was in those days after Jenn planted my garden for me.  I was literally tasting the green beans already, even though only the tiniest curl of leaves had just barely begun to poke though the soil in only a few places.  As far as I was concerned, though, it was a done deal; in my mind the vines were already taller than I and yielding buckets and buckets of crisp, mouth-wateringly tasty beans.

And the best part, I thought smugly, was that we had planted so late this year that I wouldn't have to worry about frost.  After all, it was already June.

Well, I'm sure you know as well as I what they say about counting your chickens before they're hatched and pride before a fall.  On Tuesday evening Mother Nature taught me a lesson.  And, no, it wasn't frost, at least not in the way you might think.  Here's a shot of what Tuesday evening's thunderstorm brought to my country mile.

Yup.  Two inches of pebble-sized hail, cold enough that it didn't melt completely until the sun hit it Wednesday morning.  So my tiny, fragile, treasured little baby bean plants had a stinging cold shower of ice pellets to welcome them into the world.

My tomatoes took quite a beating but I think they'll make it; my grown-from-seed cucumbers "bit the dust" (mud, actually) and won't survive but I was able to buy replacements; and the beans were still so tiny that I don't think they sustained any damage, other than the trauma of a cold bath!

It would have been a pity, after all Jenn's hard work and all my "exhausting" supervising, if the damage had been more significant.  That Mother Nature is one sly gal.  I'm going to try not to fantasize about tasting those beans until they're actually on my plate!