Northeast Gardening: Today's Weather in Your Garden - 49, 1 by gabagoo

gabagoo wrote:
I'm back in business.
We got hit last night with what may, or may not have been, a TORNADO!
The weather guys are still investigating.
A TORNADO! In YONKERS!!
Man! What a MESS!
Distant thunder started about 11:15 PM yesterday. I started going around closing windows. By 11:30 the skies opened. There was a river flowing down the street. I'm not talking about along the curbs... the ENTIRE street - curb to curb - had turned into a river! Then came the hail. It was SCARY!! I was sure the windows were going to break. The lights flickered, went out & came on again. About five seconds later - OFF! So there I was, plunged into darkness, with what sounded like boulders hitting the house. There were also crashing sounds coming from outside... front and back.
At about 10 min before midnight it became quiet.
I looked out the bedroom window at my garden. YIKES!!! What a mess!! Pots were overturned and there were leaves and branches all over the place. I could see cars turning around on the street so I figured there were branches blocking the way.
It turns out a really big tree across the street totally uprooted & was blocking North Broadway. It crushed 2 cars directly in its path (1 on each side of the street) and damaged the cars parked in front & behind those cars.
I tossed a raincoat over my nightgown, put on my garden clogs and ventured out. My neighbors were milling around, dazed.
In my complex a HUGE tulip tree in the front lost some large branches. None of them damaged any of the homes or the cars. The parking lot is right next to the area where the tree is. At the entrance to our parking lot, a large tree uprooted and fell against the power lines.
We were pretty lucky. There are 56 townhouses in my complex. Only 2 suffered serious damage. A tree fell and took out a fence and destroyed the deck behind the house. In another, a branch crashed through the living room window. The floor and a loveseat in front of the window were soaked and covered with glass. Some of the other homes had some water come in. Some window screens (including my mom's) were ripped apart by the hail.

We didn't get power back until 2PM this afternoon.
Here's a pic I took of my garden last night. You can see the hailstones and overturned pots. At that point, I all could see the mess. It wasn't until the next morning that I could see the actual damage. Most of the plants on the left side weren't too bad. They were protected by the fence. The rest... UGH! The sunflowers were all broken. most of the leaves, flowers and buds were stripped from the plants, leaving broken stems. The entire yard was covered with leaves from trees from all over.
Right now, I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed. I'll process some other pics later.

Nancy ("it's a twister, Auntie Em!!!!")