Big Wind in VA

OMGosh......."SOMETHING", gale force winds, tornado, mini-hurricane blew thorugh town about 6:00 pm. It picked up my wooden trashcan holder and hurled it right into my lil 4x4 SFG!!!!! It smashed my tomatoes and broke a hugh branch with a bunch of 4 tomatoes it. It crushed all my Zinnias and overturned most of my other pots outside of the SFG. We cleaned up the best we could and tied things back up and tried to resettle every body. All my cukes which were on a tee-pee blew over and I lost about 6 ft of cuke vine. I was able to tie most of it back up. I had just harvested a large zucchini and a cuke for dinner. (They were REALLY good ). But this was "just" a SFG. My neighbor across the street, (antique dealer), lost the entire tin roof and part of the roof of her store. It had just been replaced with new construction last week. It downed power lines, took out the cable and left live electrical wires lying on the wet ground and road.
We'll survive, I'm just glad that no one was injured or killed. Nature (God) has a way of making all things right. I 'll update my friends tomorrow after I see how the babies do over night. Don't guess I'll have to water tonight.

My best to you all, be safe and have a great weekend.

Kari and Stan

trustinhart wrote:OMGosh......."SOMETHING", gale force winds, tornado, mini-hurricane blew thorugh town about 6:00 pm.

Glad you are safe! We had that same thunderstorm blow through, but we didn't have the same winds. I did get an alert for 60 mph+ winds, though!

From what I've read here on the forum about storm damage, I think/hope your tomatoes should come back... and if your cukes are growing anything like mine are, I bet they will, too.

We usually escape the worst of the weather here, must be some trick of geography. A few years back, though, we had "SOMETHING" come up from the south and I was certain the back of the house was going to blow in. We are well protected on that side by five mature trees, but we still had all our windows cracked. Our neighbors, not so lucky, lost windows and had to replace siding. I was seconds from hiding in the bathroom when it was over. After a long, silent moment (which may have been seconds or minutes or half an hour) I ventured outside....and discovered my neighbors doing the same. EVERYTHING (and I mean everything... houses, rooftops, cars, etc.) was bright green from shredded grass as though coated in pesto. Trees and branches were down, stunned/dying songbirds fluttering on the ground.... ugh.

Virginia weather can be scary. Again... glad you are okay...and best wishes for your neighbor, too. Hope she didn't have any inventory damage on top of losing the new roof.

So sorry to hear about your storm damage. Glad you and yours are safe. That must have been the same system that blew through here a couple of days ago and left us without electricity for nearly three hours.

I agree with Megan, plants are pretty resilient as long as they still have stems and roots. I've snapped the ends of pumpkin and squash plants a few times while trying to thread them onto strings, but they usually forgive me and come back with a vengeance.

Were your green tomatoes large enough to fry or make pickled green tomatoes?

I'm in WNC and we had a bad storm last night too. No tornado but a very big tree in our neighbor's yard (possibly a pine but I'm not sure - it was very big though) blew over - root ball in the air. We had a couple of smaller trees come down too but no big damage. My DH corn was still rooted but all laying on it's side - almost to the ground. He tried to get it back up, tying it with twine but we'll see if it will make it or not. It's probably about 6' tall and forming tassles. I had the top of one pumpkin plant snap and tomato plants bent over with their cages partially out of the ground. I fixed that the best I could. Other tomato plants that are tied up to a fence are bending way over. I still need to go out and tie them back up higher. We're also on a creek and further up the creek they opened the dam, which caused flooding in our area. Thank goodness we're on the high side of the creek so we didn't get flooded but across the creek where it is lower (also where the tree came down) they were moving things in their yard because the water came about half way up to their house. Made for an exciting evening. I'm just glad the gardens didn't suffer more damage than they did. (Also glad for our neighbors that the tree didn't go the other direction, which would have landed it on top of their house.)

Thanks for ythe condolences and the updates on your weather reports. I thought I had tied every thing up pretty well and stabilized my tee-pee, but the winds came up again this evening. Not anywhere near as bad as the other night, BUT, it pulled my tee-pee over again and everything that was tied to it pulled everything else down like a bad batch of dominos. I'll take my grandkids with me in the mornng and try to salvage it all again. It's too dark now.
Thanks for the encuoraging words about the tomatos and cukes. we'll see, again thanks for being such good friends and neighbors.

See you in the garden

Kari