At Least There's Still a Farmers Market

We got hit hard yesterday evening. I had come home early because the coughing was bothering coworkers, which gave me a chance to sand down the yardsale dresser we bought a while ago. At 5:00 p.m., I picked up Evelin from work, and we drove up to Laurel to where I thought an unfinished furniture place was to see if we could find an armoire for the television (thus giving us a place to hide all those wires from prying little hands in a few months). The place I was thinking of turned out to be a scary finished furniture place, but we did find another store that had two pieces that might work.

On the way home was when we had an inkling of the trouble that awaited us. The sky was pretty dark and there was a bit of lightening to the south. As we got closer to College Park, the rain started and then got heavier and heavier. I thought I saw little bits of ice bouncing off the hood, but I wasn't sure.

In downtown College Park, water was over most of the street in a few places, but it wasn't until we got to Hyattsville that we noticed the streets were covered with leaves. Whatever sort of storm had passed through did a good job of stripping leaves, twigs, and branches from the trees.

The cross-street down the hill from us was taped off because of a downed live wire, and we had a bit of water come through two windows. (Replacing the windows jumped above getting a crib on our priority list last night.) But the real shocker was outside.

As soon as we drove up, we could see the battering the hanging baskets on the porch took, but the backyard was amazing. It turns out we got a good amount of hail. I could see some ice on the porch and in the front garden, but in the backyard the hail combined with the wind to strip a lot of leaves off the pepper plants and to snap the tops off some of the tomatoes. Even the now wilting garlic took a pounding. The corn is still too small to present a big target, which is the only reason it was spared, I think.

We trimmed the broken bits on the tomatoes and retied/staked them, but I imagine this storm has reduced our harvest by a bit.

Also amazing are the plants in the pond. The leaves on both the pickerelweed and water canna were shredded. Actually, the midridge on the leaves held and the outer edge pretty much held, but the interior of the leaves were ripped into slits. They look sort of like venetian blinds.

The water hyacinth had covered much of the surface of the pond, and I was looking forward to their blossoming, but now I can't tell what's shredded hyacinth from bits and pieces from surrounding trees. I actually found a few twigs/leaves in the pond that don't look like any of the trees in our yard or the neighbors' so I'm not sure where they were carried in from.

Saturday, I guess I'm back on the roof. There is at least one large limb up there, and I'm sure the gutters are clogged again.

Oh, and the other fun part was that our neighbor had to pull out his generator to kill any of the quiet that comes with a power outage. Across the street, our neighbors were chatting from one porch to the next while I was trying to sweep up the debris from our porch, but the noise from the generator drove all of us back inside our respective houses.