You plant your garden in May, and by June it is looking perfect. The first blooms are on the peppers and tomatoes already. The nice afternoon showers are watering your garden and then it happens. An intense hailstorm hits and you get home and look at the hail piled in your garden like snow. Now what do you do?

This is what happened to me recently and like every gardener you have to decide what to do. Do you just replant everything or try and repair the damage. To replant every plant would of course take more money, but there is also the time factor. If the storm happens early enough in the year you will be fine by replanting in most zones. But in some areas, the growing season just isn’t that long, so you have to try and fix as many plants as you can. It is hard to start over the hot season plants after July 4th in most growing zones, and impossible to do so by seed.

Broken and Bent Branches

Any broken branches should be cleanly cut off. You can cut the broken branch right at the break point or about 1/4 “ below the break. Look for any stripping of that branch below the break point. Cut the branch where the stripping ends. Some branches might just be bent downward and not broken. You can either cut these or they can be propped up. They should soon turn towards the sun and start growing again.

You might also see small white spots on the branches from where the hail hit them. Don’t remove them yet unless there aren’t any leaves left on them. New branches could grow from them. You can reassess them in a week or two.

Leaves

Leaves will be split, have holes in them or totally destroyed. Takes off the leaves where there really isn’t much leaf left. With leaves that are just split or have holes in them, leave them on the plant. They provide food for the plant and will help the plant if left on.

Fertilize

After you have cleaned up the damage to the plants you will need to fertilize them. This will get them growing again and help them ward off disease. There are several good fertilizers to use. You can use a chemical fertilizer such as Miracle-Gro, Ferti-lome or any other good vegetable or flower fertilizer. With any chemical fertilizer, make sure you follow the directions so you don’t burn the plants.

Fish emulsion mixed with kelp is an excellent organic fertilizer for the vegetable garden. Kelp is the same as seaweed and is soothing to the plants and works well as a fertilizer when mixed with the fish emulsion. A recommended brand is Neptune’s Harvest fish/seaweed blend, which you should be able to find at your garden shop, nursery and online.

Watering evenly is also important, don’t soak one day and then forget it for a week. Keep the garden evenly wet.

  This tomato plant produced 30 tomatoes      Photo by Sam Montana

If All Looks Lost

Depending on your planting zone and the time of year the storm occurs, you might be able to find large enough tomato, pepper plants, squash, and other plants to replace the lost ones. Though usually after a storm everyone else is at the garden shop or nursery looking for new plants also and they can be hard to impossible to find. By now it is of course too late to start any of these by seed.

If it’s too late to plant more early season vegetables, plant late season vegetables. You can seed a large number of plants for the fall. You can try radishes, lettuce, beets, snap peas or broccoli for example. Each planting zone is different so its best to check your areas date of first frost and count the days to maturity for your new seeds.

Flowers

You can use the same methods to repair the flower garden as well. And in many cases it can be simpler with flowers if the damage isn’t too bad. With any broken flowers or stems, just deadhead them as you normally would when the blooms fade. That means to take off the bloom of the broken stems and trim back the stem to the break point.

Trees

If the trees have been badly or even completely stripped of their leaves, you don’t have to worry about them since trees have a backup set of leaves and will actually bud and leaf again. You should inspect the bark of shrubs and trees to make sure there isn’t heavy damage to the bark itself from the hailstones.

Realize that the storm damage could stunt the growth of the plant, but with proper cleaning, watering and fertilizing they should do fine. One week later, I am seeing plenty of new growth on the tomatoes and other plants including more blooms.

© 2009 Sam Montana