About two weeks ago we had a really bad hail storm hit us. Two miles away…nothing. Here…really bad.

So to make it simple to understand…we lost our entire garden…everything! The hail was the size of marbles and came down with such a velocity that it punched holes in the leaves of plants such as our beans and cucumbers. It pulverized our squash and peppers. The newly germinated fall squash plants…beat into green mush. Only the strawberries survived intact…relatively little damage.

So what does that tell me…what is the Lesson Learned for this experience?

Had we been depending on our garden for all of our food…we would be starving now! Yes, starving…as in dying without anything to eat.

Yeah, that was pretty startling. Our philosophy has always been to have enough food storage on hand to get our garden up to speed to feed us. So maybe the first year the garden would still be too small and our experience too young for it to be a sole source of food…but it would supplement our food storage to a great degree. Then maybe by the second or third season we would be pretty much self-sustaining out of our garden. Oooooppppppssssss!

What if that third year was the next year that a devastating hail storm hit and wiped out the garden? What if that was the year that our food storage was down to a few #10 cans left on the self?

Not a pleasant thought!

So we are doing a couple of things:

1. We are going to use a “sunshade” material that handled the hail without issue. It will be ready to deploy on the garden at the first indication of, or prediction of, hail.
2. We are going to look at a rationing plan for our food storage to try and stretch it out as long as possible. The goal will be to cover more growing seasons.
3. If/when the SHTF we will use more garden produce in our diet to increase the length of our food storage usage.
4. We will add another heirloom seed bank to our preparedness.

Note: Hail did some damage to the fruit trees as well, it tore off leaves. If there had been fruit on the trees I am sure it would have destroyed most, if not all, of it. Fortunately the trees are fist or second year and no fruit was set and no major damage to the trees themselves.

Mother nature is a powerful force…you can’t stop it…but you can prepare for it.