The Manic Gardener

This post includes another entry about my father's stroke, an ongoing series I started on June 8th. Quit at the asterisks if you just want the gardening news.

Several days ago, my friend Sarah and I made the rounds of my garden, noting especially all the unprecedented molds and fungi that have sprung up. Sarah is the silver lining to the cloud that was the Bozeman Home and Garden Show last March; she's the person who came to check out the solar-panel possibilities of our shady lot, and while I haven't decided to spring for twenty-thousand dollars worth of panels, I have gained a new gardening friend–one who knows her mushrooms.

This has appeared in one of the plots on the alley:

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Yesterday's wasn't the first hail of the season; we had two storms in early June, one of which went on to spawn a tornado over Billings, 122 miles east, where it ripped the roof off the 10,000 person Rimrock Arena. You can read all about it here, and watch a video of it here, or  here. The first, very short video (21 seconds) shows the funnel clearly, but the next one, taken from much closer, shows the formation of the cloud and the debris that filled the air. Incredibly, no one was even hurt.

Here in Bozeman, my garden damage from those first storms amounted to a few shredded lettuce leaves and a still-green strawberry knocked from its stem. Pretty minor, but I have adopted a zero-tolerance policy with regard to strawberry damage, so I started putting up row-cloths over my strawberry plots scattered around the neighborhood. Eventually I installed row-cloths at the western end of all my plots, ready to whip over the beds if the weather looked threatening.(They're at the western ends so I don't have to fight the wind as I'm pulling them into place.)

My Significant Other (SO) thought this overkill, but after losing my garden to hail two summers back, I was willing to endure his laughter.

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…The sky is falling.

Look what just came down:

That, my friends, is golf-ball sized hail. In case you should doubt me, take a look at this:

There they are with a golf ball. A goofy golf ball, I grant you, but a golf ball nonetheless. A local news service, KBZK, reports baseball-sized hail on the MSU campus, about five blocks away, but I didn't see anything that big. It also reports numerous broken windows around town, and that I can believe; the neighbors just south of me took a direct hit in their big western window. Glass was sprinkled over the floor ten or twelve feet into the room.

Several hours earlier I was eating lunch with husband and friends out on the lawn, where we took refuge under trees, the sun shone so hot. Yet when I got up this morning, it was raining, and I thought we'd have to eat inside. Somehow we managed to slip the meal into the space between morning rain and afternoon hail.

This is third in an ongoing series about my father’s stroke. Again, the personal part follows a fairly straightforward gardening entry. Quit at the divider (a row of asterisks) if you’re not interested in the memoir portion.

Year-to-date precipitation for 2010:


Source: wunderground

Year’s precipitation for 2009:

Source: wunderground

Today started windy, cloudy, and cool; at midday, the temperature hadn’t even reached fifty degrees (10ºC). After an April so warm we ate on the patio several times, the weather set out to remind us that this is Montana, after all. It was snowing on the thirtieth, the day I left for Toronto and Minneapolis, and it’s been raining off and on ever since.

We got two glorious days of sunshine on Sunday and Monday, but it was too good to last. Rainfall here doesn’t begin to compare with what’s fallen in Oklahoma and, more obviously and tragically, Arkansas, but on the merely nuisance and gardening scales, it ranks pretty high.

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