September is almost gone...

September is almost gone...

It starts out looking like July, then goes right into fall mode. The gardens are spent. All tomatoes have been harvested as of last week. I’ve managed to save thousands of seeds from many varieties. That's the good news.

Now for the bad…
We had more severe weather move through the area back on Wednesday, September 3rd.

I was confused driving home that evening about 7pm because the visibility was poor due to heavy fog. Then I began to notice many leaves on the road – not branches from heavy winds, but thousands of green leaves.
When I pulled in to my drive, I got the answer as to why… HAIL!!

I was amazed to see my lawn covered with hail – mostly pea sized but even more amazed to see golfball-sized hail mixed in! This would explain the foggy conditions as the frozen hailstones melted into the humid summer air.

Some hail pictured here has bizarre shapes with frozen satellite peastones frozen around a quarter-sized stone. I never saw hail any bigger than pea-sized in all my years of living in New England. That makes for 3 total storms with hail this year.

Then I learned the horrible damage that hail does to the garden – good news here was that I already harvested the bulk of the tomatoes, so no damage to that crop. But I couldn’t believe the damage to my sunflowers…

The leaves looked like they were shot-up with machine guns!

One side of my porch looks like it got sandblasted for a new paint job!

Then we got hit with the remnants of “Hanna” back on Saturday, September 6th into Sunday.

My weather station reported 3.78 inches of rain fell in less than 12 hours. That made for some great photos of about 10 kayakers putting in at the bridge in front of my house!

I compared last year’s rainfall and found that in September of 2007 there was only 0.87” to this year’s 6.68” Making this one of the wettest Septembers ever.

:)