Epic Storms and Epic Fails

After three tries and three epic fails by my web browser over the past few days, I gave up completing this post yesterday. Grrr to the confines of using university internet and thus not my usual browser (there is a long story of useless IT in this grandparent of a university.) Stupid explorer (not my first choice but my only choice at present when at uni) gobbled up my first three tries, but hopefully the fourth will work. Over the weekend we had a rather epic storm, a ‘once in a hundred years’ type storm complete with hailstones the size of golfballs (and one, I swear, that hit tennis ball size.) Melbourne received quite a bit of damage. One of my cousin’s houses had one damaged window, another cousin scored eight broken windows! Fierce. The balcony garden did not escape unscathed, the succulents were whittled away into green sculptures with no ‘leaf’ left undamaged, the lemons were shorn clear off their branches, as too were a few habaneroes which I found on the opposite side of the balcony to their bush, the basil was stripped bare in places, several sunflowers were decapitated, the zucchini and cucumber and tomato dissolved into a puddle of browny-green mush and the leek seedlings were hit so hard most of their potting mix ended up on the bench not in the seedling pot!!!

But it is not all doom and gloom. The time has come for Autumn planting and this destruction gives me a good excuse to remove all the plants I should remove but might not have given they had a little life left in them (that was until the storm hit.) So it is out with the cukes and the zukes and the matos and the mess, and in with broccoli, snowpeas and more lettuce. The dead flowers will be replaced by an autumn sowing, most likely a random blue mix or gerberas. From destruction there will be new life. And if it manages to stop drizzling I might even be able to clean up the leaf litter too!

And I did manage to salvage some produce from before it hit, a zucchini and two ripe habaneroes. Pictures soon.