Lightning strike

On Sunday, July 1, I went upstairs in the afternoon to compress some photos in preparation for my weekly blog post. I couldn’t do anything outside because it was a) beastly hot and b) about to rain. Mom, Dad, and I were all in our respective rooms doing one thing or another on our computers at the time. I got as far as deciding which photos to use and moving them to a file on my desktop computer when lightning struck the oak tree next to the house. FLASH/BOOM. The light and sound happened at the same moment. I heard the thunder more in my bones than my ears. The tree exploded, throwing bark, leaves, and small branches everywhere. Steam (smoke?) rose from the ground at the base of the trunk.

I had grown cavalier about using my computer during thunderstorms, but I can tell you that all of us had our computers off and unplugged right quick after that.

The storm passed. Terry and I went out to inspect the damage. The lightning had gone down one branch, which looked split open.

The branch that the lightning struck

A good chunk of bark was missing from the trunk. Terry was unconcerned. He’d seen many trees struck by lightning that survived for years afterwards. “It’s 17% girdled,” he said, surveying the amount of bark missing from the trunk. “It will be fine.”

Missing bark from the trunk

17%. Not 15, not 20. He’s so quantitative. Debris was all over the place. When I expressed amazement at the magnitude of the spread, Terry told me that when he lived in North Dakota, lightning struck a cottonwood tree and sent a piece of bark all the way through a trailer house, in one side and out the other.

Terry went out right away to take a big pieces of bark out of the road. “Don’t want anyone to sue us over a flat tire,” he said. It seemed to me that a normal person would have just driven around it, but you never know. In this picture, note the piece of bark sticking straight up on the left side of the trunk. The bark was at least two inches thick, which accounts for the fact that bur oaks can survive prairie fires.

Debris scattered all over the yard

The next day, we went out to clean up the yard so I could mow. Here’s what we ended up with.

Muck buckets full of bark and branches

And here’s the post that I was going to do last week:

The garden seems to be recovering slowly. The beans at the north end kept some of their leaves after the flood. This picture shows new growth above the silt-covered leaves.

New leaves above silt-covered leaves

Many of the beans dropped all their leaves after being submerged. My assumption that the buds had survived proved correct in many cases, as shown here.

New growth from completely defoliated beans

The zucchini also had fresh green leaves above the dusty ones.

The surviving zucchini looks pretty good

The cabbage plants that I bought at Klein’s seemed to double in size overnight.

New cabbage plant

The cabbages that I so hoped had survived did not. My guess is that a few of the roots survived the flood but the rapid onset of hot, dry, windy weather took more water out of the leaves than the roots could provide. There was no opportunity for the roots to recover.

A cabbage that initially survived the flood died in the hot, dry weather afterwards

Hilda noticed that a raccoon with wet feet had taken a stroll down the landscape cloth.

Raccoon prints on the landscape cloth

The meat chickens are getting more comfortable with being outside, although they tend to stay in the coop during the heat of the day. We have a fan in there. In the cool of the evening, however, they lounge about on the lawn.

Chicks lounging on the lawn in the cool of the evening

We take the food away at night, as I have mentioned many times, so that the meat chickens will not outgrow their legs and become lame. That results in a feeding frenzy in the morning.

The morning feeding frenzy

In this video, you can see that two Whiting True Blue chicks work their way to the feed by slipping between the monstrous meat chickens and walking on top of the feed. On this particular day, four of the pullets chose to not even join the fray. They will eat after the meat chickens settle down.