Yeah, unfortunately that does happen.
We have had quite a few so far. Especially in June– but all the hailing were tiny (less than 1/2″ diameters) and fleeting (5-10 minutes)
In July, when temperatures rise and the extremes becomes more so, the hail storms become that much more severe. And hail in August? … I cross myself even tho the gods do not exist.
Today/July 6th, we had two rounds of nearly an hour of torrential raining each, accompanied both time with near constant hailing as well. With hails that began to breach my usual laid-back attitude of “oh the hail’s only just 1/2″ or so.”
It’s hard to portray green damage against green backgrounds…. But I took some photos a little while after the first round. The brown paths here are covered in white ice. And all the greens that you see on top of the white… are broken greens.
Damaging hail in July when the garden is just getting to its summer peak always hurts.
However my garden’s lately taken a shift towards using more native plants. Not just any old, but best of the best– at least as far as our particular goals and this particular region/climate. Most of them are rather hardy to this type of beating.
Here, flags mark spots where there are slow growing wildflowers becoming established in this dragonfly meadow of seeding buffalo grass, now weighted down by hail:
