A hard rain in Colorado doesn’t involve relatively soft objects — like cats and dogs or frogs. For us a hard rain too frequently reminds us of marbles, golf balls and baseballs.
Mostly it’s the size of peas and doesn’t do much damage to herbage or abode. We haven’t had to file an insurance claim for more than a decade.
The occasional storm leaves roof, windows, siding and automobiles intact, but does a job on the garden. This year, to add insult to injury, hail has been arriving in the middle of the night. Few things are as unsettling as being awakened at 3 a.m. by ice balls pummeling the windows. After assessing their size and not hearing a tornado siren, you close the windows, pull a pillow over your head and attempt to sleep through it.
After all, we desperately need the precipitation. This dry winter has been catastrophic. If your storm doesn’t make the national news, it’s a minor setback.
It’s best to wait a day or two to allow everything to dry out before cleaning up. Then sweep up slimy debris from sidewalks and driveways where it might be a slipping hazard and then, if you can, go away to the mountains for a couple of days. In the past, I’ve tried spraying my demolished garden with a diluted aspirin solution or a product like Messenger, but I suspect what helps most is simply removing the broken bits. A lot of the damage is not immediately apparent. I didn’t realize that budded lily stems had been snapped off at the base until they turned brown — by then too late to bring them indoors as cut flowers.
Right now, a lot of perennial flowers and shrubs benefit from cutting back in any case. Spring bloomers like moss phlox, and groundcover veronicas get leggy and covered with seedheads. Tidy these up by shearing them approximately in half. Summer bloomers like tall phlox, asters, chrysanthemums and tall sedums won’t need staking if a third of the top growth is pruned off once or twice before the first of July. Afterwards, treat plants with a light dose of fertilizer and water if the soil isn’t already wet. Container plantings experience an odd phenomenon: Hail compacts potting soil, leaving roots exposed. I’ve had to replenish the soil in my pots several times.
The good thing about spring hailstorms is that the garden has plenty of time to recover. Witness which was demolished in July of last year, but had recovered a couple of months later. When I woke this morning to the third hailstorm of this season, I did take some comfort in that thought.
E-mail Marcia Tatroe at mtatroe@q.com.
