My Poor Garden

I can't believe almost two months has gone by since my last post. I claim wedding mania and lack of projects to blog. When all this began, I had every intention of taking photos of the whole process and posting about it at least once a week ... and then, in the middle of all that process, it just seemed like too much to handle. I beg your forgiveness, kind readers, and hope you will bear with my through my waxing and waning attention span.

Which brings me to my container garden. I know I posted pictures a while ago of my little seedlings as they were coming up. Because of the lack of posting, there are only these very early photos of my little sprouts. I was going to take photos of my thriving plants to update you and share the excitement of the yumminess that was sure to come.

Around the beginning of May, I added two tomato plants (a German Queen and Mr. Stripey), a yellow bell pepper plant, and a cucumber plant to the basil, fennel, lavender, chives and snapdragons. Everything was doing amazingly well ... the dry Colorado sunshine combined with a healthy watering every day meant I had five tomatoes already coming in on each plant, a TON of baby cucumbers hanging down, and a fair few peppers beginning. The basil was looking lush (and smelled great), and we had been snipping fennel and adding it to just about everything for the past few weeks.

Then ... a Colorado summer hail storm happened.

It started innocently enough as a decent-sounding thunderstorm. Before we knew it there was golf-ball-sized hail coming down so fast and so hard it looked like it was snowing ice balls outside. It came about so quickly that I couldn't run out to cover the plants for fear of a concussion. To put this into perspective: both side mirrors on Dear's Ford F150 work truck were broken in several places. There were piles of ice still in place the next morning, making it look like we had wasted perfectly good Sno-Cones in our yard.

Now this is all that remains of my vegetables.

The German Queen Tomato



The Yellow Bell Pepper


Mr. Stripey Tomato


Sad Little Cucumber


Basil

The basil is still looking fairly hearty ... it's the chip taken out of the planter I wanted to share. The tomatoes just might make it because they were so big in the first place and the fruits are still there and looking okay (a little bruised, but hopefully will be edible). The bell pepper was a little runty because of an earlier, less-dramatic hail storm ... but my cucumber. My cucumber breaks my heart. It was so lush and the leaves were big and fuzzy-prickly, and we had a sizable cuke coming down that had a massive chunk taken out of it. I'm hoping with a little TLC and some extra water and *HOPEFULLY* no more hail storms, we might be able to salvage a few pieces out of these.

This was my first actual gardening attempt and it was going very well. I was truly excited for fresh tomatoes in my salad and cucumbers warm from the sun .... Does anyone know how to bring a fledgling garden back from the dead?