By the time you read this you will have already noticed that the box this week is …. surprisingly lightweight. Pretty vacant. Well. Remember last week, when I said something about how even though the rain skips around us, at least the storms do too? Yeah..

After 13 lucky years, our luck ran out. Last Friday, we were in the field harvesting for the farmer’s market when our phones blew up with a tornado warning. Radar showed a purple blob among the incoming red stormclouds, rolling straight at us. . I watch radar like some dudes watch sports and I knew it was a doozy and I knew it wasn’t going to miss. I hurried from the field, shut the high tunnel up tight, rounded up the kids and the dog and the cat and herded them into the root cellar.

The purple blob came into view over the western treeline. Crazy clouds. I don’t know what they’re called, but I think they’re hail clouds. Because we didn’t get a tornado or even much for wind, but we got a sustained and intense downpour of ice . “Shreddy sized.”

When we emerged the world felt like someone left the freezer open and smelled of the insides of plants. “Like someone just mowed a lawn, but the lawn was our vegetable garden.”

We scooped thick piles of ice away from the tattered remnants to avoid adding freeze damage to their 99 problems.

It was bad. The worst we’ve had in thirteen years.

So your box isn’t one of the best in those thirteen years.

But ….

We have seven new baby chicks, peeping and hopping and serving as the living embodiment of hope.

And on the heels of the storm, we began a visit from one of our O.G. WWOOFers – Grace, who was here for all of the 2016 season!

In the intervening decade she had four kids, all near our kids ages, and the whole squad came to the farm for several days. Good times ensued.

Clan Grace headed for home after we finished up with the CSA harvest just now:

Inside Box 2

A moment of silence (or noise) for the kale, bok choi, and lost lettuce. I really wanted to include some “hail-massaged kale” but it was just way too ripped up.

But! We did get some lettuce for you – the leaves shielded by kale or weeds or their fallen brethren! The sweetest lettuces are these, according to Folklore.

The Snow Peas are sometimes blemished by hailstones. (We ate the ones that were blasted open while harvesting the rest.)

Salad Turnips

Oregano

Garlic Scapes

Radish Microgreens

Spring Onions

postscript

I, feel … hopeful. Things are definitely set back, and will need time to grow some new new stems and leaves. We’ll lose some things, but there are always some that don’t make it for one reason or another – and others that flourish. I see little tiny leaves pushing out of the wreckage. Life uh, finds a way. There are some really good, positive metaphors to be mined here, if you’d like.

But dang, it’s absolutely pouring rain here (I write these in the ride from farm to The Cities.) I’ll take my cue.