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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Missouri Weather

A wild storm passed through here Friday with several small tornadoes nearby and fierce 80-90 mile per hour straight winds. We had no damage, lost power for only a couple of hours, and noticed damaged signs, downed trees, and debris blown around. Sadly, our CSA farmers, Curtis and Sarah did not fare as well. An excerpt from Curtis's email follows :


"Greetings from the farm. We have been incommunicado for a couple of days, as we were out of electricity for about 36 hours, and frankly wouldn't have had much time to work on e-mail for the last couple of days anyway. We had some pretty bad damage from the wind storm yesterday morning, including some roof damage to our house and barn, some structural damage to the big greenhouse, a total loss of the hoophouse, and collapse of two smaller greenhouses. We are all fine, for which we are very grateful, and the death toll was only 4 baby chicks, which is very good considering we had about 200 in the brooder when it collapsed. The biggest loss is the hoophouse, which was the large 20 X 100 greenhouse which we constructed last year, in which we had planted 200 feet of tomatoes, 100 feet of cucumbers, and 100 feet of melons. We had constructed this from scratch, using mostly materials we had on hand or had salvaged, but the replacement cost would be about $6,000.It was totally destroyed, and I'm afraid it will not be covered by insurance. Bummer. The plants which were under the hoophouse mostly survived, although they are pretty beat up, and we will not be getting early tomatoes and cukes off of them this season, as they will be severely set-back. Other crops in the field took a beating too, just from whipping in the wind. I think most stuff will recover pretty well, although you may be getting some cosmetically blemished greens and onions for a while, and this will delay some future harvests, like bell peppers and eggplant, which were in one of the small greenhouses which collapsed. Meanwhile, we are trying to get caught up with our bed preparation and seeding or transplanting, which has been difficult with all the rain we've been having. As I said before though, we are still very grateful; "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord". I had better sign off for now, it's been a long couple of days, with clean-up and trying to keep our freezers frozen with no power lines, and I need some sleep. I'm still thankful to be your farmer, and very grateful for your support of our farm.
Sincerely,
Curtis"


1 comment:

  1. Its a lot o damage, but at least they are okay and keeping their chins up. Let him know that he is getting some positive thoughts from Massachuetts.

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