Well, I'm seeing some marble-sized now and bigger, and it is just pouring! The squash leaves are all bent down, and are now laying in water/hail.

The leaves are shredded, and some stems are broken. I don't know if they'll survive that, but I will start some more seeds this evening.

Where are you Turbo Cat? Sorry to hear about the hail!

Hey Amy, I'm in Claremore. My daughter on the west side of town didn't get any hail at all. Well, I'll try to assess it all tomorrow. I may end up losing the squash and zucchini, and I know I lost some small branches on the tomatoes, but maybe they will be ok. Everything looks very sad right now, though.

I'm surprised you didn't get any, because it was blowing that direction. Torrential rain as well.

Mary, I suspect the plants will bounce back just fine. I've had plants bounce back really quickly from getting pounded by hail that was between golf ball and half-dollar sized at just about this same time of the year. Even though the plants were just shredded and torn to pieces, I just cleaned up all the debris off the ground and cut off some of the surviving leaves (not all of them, because the plants needed some leaves to conduct photosynthesis so they could make new growth) and within 2-3 weeks, they had regrown so much that you really couldn't tell they ever had been hailed upon. I hope that your plants recover as quickly.

I didn't even know y'all were having a storm u[p there because I've been watching the storms in Texas that aren't too far from us (and don't appear to be headed towards us either).

Dawn

That storm came out of nowhere! lol And from the east of all places, blowing hard and to the west. The intensity of the downpour was almost horizontal and the squash leaves are pointing west now. I am going to try and save them, if I can. I will cut off the broken stems, put on some fungicide. My 6 year old grandson said, "look Grandma, I can put my fingers through all the holes". The cucumbers growing up the trellis didn't get a lot of damage. Anyway, I went ahead and pulled the squash off the plants, and I'll go ahead and start some more seeds.

When you remove very damaged leaves, do you take it all the way down to the base of the plant?

Turbo Cat, I kept hearing thunder, expecting a storm and nothing happened here. And the radar did show things moving in odd directions. I'm surprised Claremore got hit, sorry!

Well, I just inspected the garden, and I have quite a bit of tomato damage. The plants themselves should be fine, as I can trim them up, but a lot of fruits have damage. I know it could be much worse, because if the hail had been bigger my garden would be toast.

Question for you all: How much damage is TOO much? The skin is broken on many tomatoes, from small skinned places, to small shallow penetrating wounds. Can I wait and see if they try to heal??? Or is rot now inevitable?

My grandson and I are going to start some more squash and zucchini today, and I may go ahead and start tomato seeds and hope for a fall crop.

Mary

Yes, I remove squash leaves back to the base of the plant, and remove most other damaged leaves back to whatever branch they emerge from. I always spray with a fungicide after hail storms too in an effort to keep fungi from infecting the wounds on the plants.

That does sound like such an odd storm that blew up out of nowhere and moved east to west. It seems like our weather gets stranger every year.

Any tomato whose skin is damaged will be very vulnerable not only to rot (especially given that this week's forecast has a lot of rain in it) and to insects. I'd remove them all (sorry) and use them for something. Green tomatoes are great fried, or can be used in various canning recipes.....like pickled green tomatoes. At least it is early enough in the season that you'll get reblooming and lots of new fruit formation.

If you want to leave the hail-damaged tomatoes on the plants, you can, but that means a lot of the plant energy will be going into trying to enlarge and ripen tomato fruit that probably are too damaged to survive. I'd rather have the energy going into making new fruit. Caterpillars, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, etc. all will be incredibly attracting to wounded tomatoes, and so will pill bugs and sow bugs. Keeping damaged fruit on the vines is very risky. If the only damage is bruised/skinned tomatoes and it is mostly on the surface and doesn't penetrate into the flesh, those fruit might survive.

I am sorry to hear about all the damage to the plants. Hail is so wicked. I hate hail. One year we had it 11 times, but it was relatively small and didn't do widespread damage. One year we only had it once, but it destroyed the garden. Here in OK, where there seems to be hail somewhere on every day that it rains in spring, hail can be incredibly hard on gardens and gardeners.

Dawn

Dawn, fried green tomatoes it is.