📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Summer Storms & Harvests
- ⛈️ Storm Survival: A sudden summer thunderstorm after a drought is a mixed blessing. It deeply waters the garden, but intense sideways rain and wind can drown young broiler chicks in their outdoor pens and turn ripening strawberries to mush.
- 🥔 New Potatoes: If you dig up early “new” potatoes after a dry spell and find them too small, don’t panic. If the vines are thick and green, the tubers will rapidly size up after a heavy soaking rain. Steaming fresh new potatoes keeps them starchy and prevents them from getting waterlogged!
- 🥦 Late June Bounties: Despite the crazy weather swings, late June brings the first harvests of young eggplants, broccoli heads, and the very first new potatoes.
Did you get hit by any wild summer thunderstorms this year? Tell us your storm stories below!
Escaping the Thunderstorm!
We had such an incredibly strong thunderstorm yesterday! We were actually swimming at the local ponds when it hit. We had to sprint to the car under lightning and thunder, the trees were bending all the way to the ground, it was terrifying! People were running in panic with their kids, kids were screaming… 😂 It came out of nowhere. One minute it was sunny, and the next it was pitch black with driving rain and wind.
When we got home, the yard was flooded, and the power had gone out. Thank goodness we managed to drive through the automatic gate just in time, because it stopped working without electricity.
In the small livestock pen, all the baby chicks had hidden in the corners, completely soaked. 🐥💦 The adult ducks, on the other hand, were having the time of their lives–swimming around in the puddles and quacking happily! 🦆
Well, at least the whole garden finally got a deep watering, because everything had completely dried out during the drought. The only thing I feel sorry for is the strawberries–they will probably turn to mush. The rain lasted a looong time, right into the night, and early this morning the thunderstorms and downpours started all over again.
In between the rains today, I managed to harvest 4 small eggplants, 1 head of broccoli (I have 4 more large heads waiting their turn), and I dug under a couple of potato bushes. The “new” potatoes have grown a bit, but they are still quite small. They probably just didn’t have enough water. 🍆🥦🥔
Maria Suvorova wrote:
We had such an incredibly strong thunderstorm yesterday!
Oh my goodness, we had a hurricane-force storm hit around 1:00 PM today. It was terrifying. Anything that wasn’t tied down got scattered across the yard. It was scary just looking out the window, the rain was coming down completely sideways. The rain lasted for two hours, but the extreme wind lasted for 20 minutes. 🌪️
My one-month-old broiler chicks are in an outdoor tractor pen (which has a roof and partially covered sides), but the rain was blowing so hard sideways that they got flooded. I had to run out into the drizzle and drag them all back into the main coop. They were completely soaked! 🐓💧
Thankfully, the storm didn’t snap my sweet cherry tree. All the branches are hanging heavy, loaded with ripening fruit. Overall, the garden got a fantastic watering!
Maria Suvorova wrote:
…the potatoes have grown a bit, but they are still quite small, they probably didn’t have enough water.
Masha, what a wonderful harvest!
Don’t worry about the potatoes. They might be a bit small right now because your vines are so fat and lush (which delays tuber formation), but after these heavy rains, the tubers will rapidly size up!
I actually cooked some of my early “new” potatoes in the steamer today, and it was an absolute delight. Even though they are young and small, steaming them kept them from getting watery. They were perfectly starchy and crumbly. 🥔🧈
When a heavy thunderstorm hits the garden after a prolonged dry spell, plants react in extreme ways.
While heavy rain is great for sizing up root crops like potatoes and beets, it is a disaster for ripening fruit. Strawberries will often absorb water so fast that their cells burst, turning them into mushy, flavorless water-bombs (or causing them to rot on the vine). Tomatoes can also suffer from extreme “radial cracking” if they absorb a sudden deluge of water after being dry.
