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First, the good news.
All the people, animals and vehicles here at Birdsong are unharmed.
After Monday’s hail storm, however, I can’t say the same for our hail/shade netting!
I could feel this coming, and last week had asked Rick how he thought we should protect the cars if we had severe weather (our business is heavily reliant on them).
Just before the storm, we walked outside to view the skies and saw the tell-tale green tinge of impending hail.
India was running around frantically trying to make sure the chickens and ducks had enough shelter in case the hail was fatally-sized.
Chickens don’t happen to be the brightest of animals, and chose to stand about two meters away from the shelter, saturating their feathers in the heavy rain. Oh well, she tried!
Before long, hail was pelting down (very exciting for the little boys!) and thankfully it was only small.
Once the hail stopped and the rain slowed a little, I ran out to inspect the damage. Wow. We’ve had strong winds that have damaged the steel support poles of the hail netting before, but this was something else. Almost the entire acre of hail netting was down, and some of the steel posts were bent completely in half.
Large piles of hail were caught in the netting- the netting did protect the crops, at least. Twenty-four hours later, there was still piles of hail that hadn’t melted yet!
Rick wasn’t phased at all. These things happen, and while they take time to repair/rebuild, it’s really no big deal in the scheme of things.
So for the past few days, he has been out there in an excavator working at repairing the ruins. He says the shade net needed a remodelling anyway 🙂
The crops appear to have survived unscathed, and we had harvested a lot of produce just the day before, so business goes on pretty much as usual!