This is my first year for potting up tubers. Many of them dried out, while others were left in the winter storage bin. I'm not sure that in a lot of cases, the tubers potted up in the garage would have fared better had they been left in the winter storage. Too many dried out because the ground was soaking wet and cold for longer than anticipated. The ones left in storage still look fine! In the past, I've always planted tubers outside, without verifying eyes or anything. And they've done reasonably well. Granted, I was planting them first week of May, not the 1st week of June. But I had flowers! Some may not bloom until fall, but at least you'll have more tubers to store in vermiculite for the 2012 growing season.

It all depends on the plants themselves, how well they are established, and how large the root systems are. Some plants bounce back well from hail damage, and others don't. The time of the year matters too. July hail, for example, is devastating for plants because then they have to try to regrow in extreme heat. April hail, while frustrating, isn't as bad because the weather is milder and it is easier for plants to regrow and still have a chance of producing a harvest. I have had both peppers and tomatoes regrow from roots only after hail has broken them off right at the ground. They usually show new growth from the tiny stub of the stem within 2 weeks, or maybe 3 at the most. Other plants like corn and sometimes onions usually won't bounce back if the growing tip is broken off. You can harvest damaged onions and use them as green onions or as small bulb onions depending on their size. If your onions have grown enough that the bulb's top is protruding out of the ground and they get hit by hail, I go ahead an harvest them. I know from experience that the hail-bruised part of the bulbs become a gateway for the various onion diseases if I leave them in the ground. When a tomato or pepper plant is damaged, you have to assess each plant individually. I try to prune off as much of the damage as I can, except I do try to leave some sort of foliage on the plant if it is at all possible because the foliage conducts photosynthesis. Even if the foliage looks like crap, the amount of photosynthesis it can conduct will help the plants rebound more quickly and, later on, after the plants are putting out new foliage, then you can prune off the crappy-looking damaged foliage left over from the hail- or wind-damaged plants. Most other garden veggies will rebound. Even bean plants broken off near the ground will regrow, but if the weather is already insanely hot, they may not be able to set a crop before heat slows fertilization to a crawl. I keep a large assortment of boxes and plastic buckets in the garage and will cover up whatever is small enough to still be covered if I can see a storm approaching that is likely to have hail. However, in high wind, those boxes or buckets can be blown around and can do damage too if they become projectiles. When I have time, I will put a brick or paving stone on top of each bucket to hold it down. Most of the time, I don't have that much warning with hail. Good heavens, with the way that a chance of hail is in the forecast practically every other day in April, May and June, you'd have to cover up the plants 3 or 4 days a week and that's just not practical. The good news is that while the risk of hail is in the forecast often, it rarely hits any given spot. For our first 12 years here, we averaged one hail storm a year, but then last year we got hit with it 11 times in the spring (luckily, it was mostly small hail) so that blew our average out of the water. I guess from now on I'll have to say it averages twice a year here when I roll in last year's numbers with all the previous years. Hail is one of the reasons I always have some plants in containers. I can pull them up under the patio cover and usually they survive unless high wind blows the hail sideways up underneath the patio cover. Even if a person only has, let's say, 3 tomato plants and 3 pepper plants in a moveable container, that still leaves you something undamaged if the hail takes out every plant in the garden. Once the tomato plants are caged, as mine are now, covering them with buckets is impossible, but sometimes you can protect plants by placing something over the tops of the cages----a layer of 1" chicken wire, 1/4" hardware cloth, 6 mm or heavier sheet plastic, etc. When I do that, I use 2 x 4 lumber placed on top of the covering to hold it down. One year, when hail started heading our way from our southwest when I had just finished transplanting tomato and pepper seedings into two raised beds, Tim and I frantically carried white folding tables (I have 5 of them that I mostly use to hold seedling flats in the spring), all our lawn furniture, etc., to the garden and protected those plants from that hail storm. We put quilts and blankets over the furniture to try to prevent hail from coming in at the sides. After the hail hit, we left the furniture and quilts in place overnight in case the continuing storms brought more hail. If you were driving up our road, it looked like we had set up an elaborate garden party in the garden, lol, but it was just an effort to protect plants. I wouldn't go to that extreme usually, but with brand new transplants, it was worth the time to protect them on their transplant day. Flowers vary in their ability to recover too, so I just prune them the same way I do the tomato and pepper plants and watch to see if they rebound. Hail is very hard on fruit trees and I often lose the whole crop to hail. That's not much you can do to avoid it. You can't really cover up the huge crown of a mature fruit tree. I hope the hail that is in the forecast misses us all, but as spread out as we are, it is likely someone's garden may get hit. Hail (along with late frosts) is also the reason I grow so many backup plants. That way, at least through the end of April, I have backups if the worst happens. I give the backups away at the Spring Fling, so after that, the plants I have in the ground had better survive! Dawn

Sharon, I think they would have been fine even if they got rained upon by heavy rainfall. The curing process is really all about not just the external moisture drying up, but the internal moisture as well. As the internal moisture dries up somewhat, the scales on the onions move together near where the stalk emerged from the plant. As they move together, the neck of the onion shrinks down to nothing, and the moving together of the scales sort of seals the onion closed, so to speak, to keep moisture and rot from entering it through the stalk end. It is too bad you didn't get more rain. I wouldn't mind my onions getting wet at all if it meant the ground got moisture. As for the grasshoppers, they'll eat anything. Sheila, Let them dry out some. How much a heavy rainfall would hurt them would depend on how well cured they were or weren't at the time it rained. Since you know they got really wet, dry them out well before you store them in order to keep the wet areas from rotting. If they already were well-cured and the neck of the onions had thinned down and dried down, I doubt the rainfall would hurt them at all if they already are on a table, screen, etc. drying and curing. If they were in the field, I'd be worried rot could set in, and I'd get them out of the field ASAP. Dawn

Hi all, thanks for your comments! I apologize for the delay in getting back here (last week was a crazy one at work). brickeyee, thanks for those words about bidding to unknowns and that anecdote about the Virginia job. It's a good illustration. It also helped me put myself in the bidder's shoes, and think of course, I'd overestimate the size of the unknown, just to cover my bases. Renovator8, thank you for that "alternate" term. That's good advice about using them wisely! I think in my case, I am making it too complicated. juliekcmo, I think you hit the nail on the head about my anxiety about covering all contingencies. So thanks for your pragmatic comments, they made me feel a lot better about not trying too hard. :-) My real life job demands me to be detail-oriented (well, downright picky), and I'm consciously trying not to let my habits at work creep into this project and potentially drive away good workers. All of your comments helped me see that most of these "what ifs" are things that are probably out of both my and the GC's control and unknown until they happen. I was thinking of them as "change orders", but really, they'd come external to either of us. I mean, whether the inspector says something has to be done--that's up to the inspector. So, it does sound like the best would be as juliekcmo wrote, bid the known scope and have my contingency fund in reserve. Thanks for bringing clarity to that!