When a doppler radar alert came up on my phone just before 8:30pm yesterday, it was all standard procedure by now: we head out to close up our tunnels from winds, thunderstorms and hail and pull down the sides of our caterpillar tunnels, to make sure storms shed properly. With just the two of us, it only takes about 15 minutes but as soon as the nickel size hail started coming down, we had to shelter in place in amongst our protected cucumbers. What followed for about 10 minutes was an ouslaught of the largest hail we've ever seen here at the farm, and during our lifetime. During that time we had significant damage.

About 21 beds of salad greens, in addition to many large crops, were pretty much shredded. The hail even punctured all the row cover that was out (even that big, 30' wide stuff we've been using), and the roof to our small greenhouse has some holes. We alerted our chefs last night, and the growers cooperative that we will have no salad mix this week at all, and we aren't yet sure how long the blackout will last.  We are still assessing the damage, and will have to see if some regrowth happens in the next weeks or if we are multiple weeks out from any more greens. For those of you who want hard numbers, it's difficult to say what the extent will be. The salad greens lost could be anywhere from $3,500 as a best-case scenarios, to upwards of $10,000 depending on whether the smallest plantings rebound or not.  With our level of experience -- don't forget, we are just 5 years into this -- we don't really have enough to say what other long-term important crops will recover. Plants can recover a lot from damage, and it's just a question if we have enough growing days in the season for them to replace lost leaves and bounce back. There are some crops that Mary and I each take rather personally, and we are respectively worried about some of those, but we will just have to wait and see.

We've weathered these kinds of losses before with the help of our community and farm members, and our spirits -- and yours -- shouldn't be dampened too much. Some beds we'll turn back under today, feeding the earthworms to prepare for planting again in a few weeks, and others we'll watch carefully for recovery.  We still have the time to pivot and make new plans for some of our 3 acres of production during this growing season, and we did do huge Thursday and Friday harvests that made sure crops were protected in our walkin cooler that runs at a steadfast 39 degrees under my watchful eye. We made enough at market to replace that damaged row cover, and we'll use the perforated stuff that will no longer work as flea beetle protection, as frost protection this fall, especially if this sets the squash and pumpkins back a few weeks.

This has really made us appreciate all the protected space in high tunnels that we have been building over the last years on the farm.  Some of you (and sometimes we) have seemed a little skeptical of the number of tunnels and structures we've put up, but when we imagined how our peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes would have been shredded out in that hail we were so grateful to have them under good protection.  Their tunnel roofs have some dents, but those plants were completely unscathed. 

So, here's the deal. All farm members: if you didn't fill up already at market,  to ensure that we have the freshest as most variety for you, we are encouraging you to fill your bags as early as possible this week, as early as Monday or Tuesday. When the currently stocked baby greens run out, there will be no replacements for an uncertain amount of time.  

To everyone that supports the farmstore, this goes for you as well. Come out early as possible this week if you want baby greens. When the Thursday/ Friday harvest runs out, it may be out for a while.  The coolers won't be completely bare, as there was a lot under the protected (but damaged) row cover that will be fine, and the cucumber tunnel is continuing to pick up speed. It hurts to cancel about 1/3 of our income this week (chefs and wholesale), but you are our core, our community, and the reason we are in this. Egg sales to chefs have been canceled for the foreseeable future too, just to make sure we can maximize variety in the farmstore. The chickens remained uneffected and their main cover crop for the late summer wasn't yet seeeded, so they are in great spirits.

Also, we still are staffing our farmstore from 3.30-6.00 on Tuesdays but it still be open all the time. We just won't be turning on a third cooler this week and may even shut down a small cooler -- a summer first. Given the scale of what happened, our and our changing strategies, it's more important than ever to emphasize that we don't have time to visit outside of this regular weekly window this week when we staff the farmstore. You are welcome to walk around and check out the farm during other hours, but if you encounter us in the fields, please understand that we are on the move and pushing hard to get everything done, and we don't have time to chat. It's really gearing up for a funny, odd week. Normally all 3-4 of us harvest and wash and pack all day Monday, and most of Tuesday, and there won't be any of that this week (or maybe just a few hours, instead of 20-30 (that's on Monday and Tuesday alone), so we are still wrapping our heads around what to do with ourselves! There's plenty, don't worry, but it's just an entire re-tooling of our weekly schedule, so there are going to be some confused farmers this week.

And, thank you in advance, too, for your cards, calls, emails, snacks and love. We have a long list already of gifts that have showed up, announced and unannounced in the farmstore coolers this year and it's just amazing. You really all do give us so much.

We'll try our best to let you know that where we have gaps in our production, too, where you can find produce from others, too, as we are all in this together. We just heard by text that Lindsay and Randi got hit pretty hard too, but others farther north are unscathed. As Lindsay said, we'll all learn a lot in the next few days about how things reboot. 

And, finally, see below the damage images, for what we are eating, becuase there's a lot of it!