I think the baseball size hail was an exageration unless it was a fluke in one area. More like golf ball size... lol At the time, I was in Marblehead, where a tornado-like effect happened on Marblehead Neck. People there reported hearing a "freight train noise" typical of tornadow, and the top of a big oak tree was snapped off during that. While I didn't see the tornado, I do rememeber thinking that the sky was very unusual -- not like a typical thunderstorm. It was a gray-yellow, and in recollection, I've read that that's the color of a tornado sky. I was listening to the radio, and the Emergency Broadcast System came on with a tornado warning for Essex County, noting that a funnel cloud was spotted in Topsfield moving toward Ipswich and Cape Ann. There was no mention of Marblehead. It was very still, then suddenly a violent downpour with walnut-sized hail and nearby intense lightning hit. I drove home to Salem under a barrage of huge hail, but remarkably didn't see any damage to my pickup truck later (of course, it already has so many little dings and scrapes from doing work that no one would notice hail damage). The immediate area was heavily flooded, and I thought of some of our key local areas -- Canal and Jefferson Streets in Salem, and Foster Street in Peabody, which are always seriously compromised when we have a deluge. After the worst passed, I was grateful to note that while some of my tall perennials were drooping and the sunflowers had big holes punched in their leaves by hail, my home and property had been spared real damage. Being on a slight hill, the water ran through my cellar but drained out the sump. I remember a tornado touching down in Salem and Marblehead when I was a kid, and another briefly forming in Vinnin Square on the Swampscott/Salem line in the 1970s. But they are rare phenomena here. More common in the Connecticut River Valley from Central Mass. to Central Conn. than in coastal Mass.

Kelly, Every day that it doesn't rain there just brings you one day closer to the next opportunity for rain. Hang in there! Dawn

Heather, If your plants get hit, and if you are coming to the Spring Fling, I can bring you replacement plants. My "back-up" plants are about 2' tall and begging to be planted, and I keep promising them that some nice people from the garden forum are going to give them nice homes in a couple more weeks. These plants likely will have flowers and fruit by the time the Spring Fling arrives. Please do keep us posted on the weather threat as it becomes clearer later in the week. While you storm-chasing people are out chasing them, I'll be preparing to go down into the hidey-hole if any come our way. And, if you chase, please be careful. Two years ago our local electric co-op gave our fire department a storm siren because we are much too far from town to hear the ones in town. It is great, with the only catch being that someone has to leave home and drive up to the station to sound the siren. We just learned that the co-op is going to put some sort of box on the siren that will allow our firefighters to call the box and sound the siren from their sound phones. Now, that is some great technology! When Tim first joined the fire department in 2003, if there was a tornado warning, the firefighters had to get in their fire trucks and drive around, sirens blaring, to alert people. I never liked that method because it put the firefighters at risk. Suzie, It was the very late 1970s or maybe 1980, and those were such "innocent times" because weather information just wasn't as widely disseminated back then. My brother had recently been through the Wichita Falls tornado, I believe, so maybe it was '79 or '80, so we surely were aware of the threat but thought of wicked storms as something that happened in Tornado Alley but not in our specific part of the region. We were out to dinner near the mall with a lovely young couple. My sister had babysat their young children for several years. As we were leaving the mall, the news guy on WBAP-820 was describing a possible tornadic cell near Benbrook moving towards us, and one farther away at Lake Worth, also moving our way. One was coming from the northwest towards us and the other from the southwest. When he said hail was likely, possibly very large hail, and tornadoes, we went to the mall near the restaurant which was about half below ground and half above ground. It was a good decision. Hail fell at the mall, but the worst damage was in our own Fort Worth suburb a few miles away. I actually lived in Arlington then in my own apartment, so after making sure my parents were okay that night, I took my little sis back to my apartment so we could sleep. Fat chance of that! We both were so wound up on adrenalin that we really didn't sleep. Driving back from Arlington to Fort Worth we were able to see that the storm damage covered many miles, and the damage varied from minor to major depending oh how much wind and hail any given area received. Everywhere you looked the trees were blown down, torn up, branches on the ground or broken branches handing from trees, clumps of leaves on the ground, flowers just pounded into oblivion, and even dead birds lying on the ground, It was simply awful. In old parts of town where older homes had those big metal awnings (from maybe the 1930s thru the 1950s?) over the windows, the awnings were crumpled like tin foil. I remember that they couldn't even found replacement metal awnings because no one made them any more. Fast forward a few years later and some of my co-workers lived in a part of Arlington that got hit by baseball to softball sized hail three years in a row. In some cases, they'd barely finished getting the homes back to normal from the prior year when gigantic hail hit again. After the third storm, I told several of them that if I were them, I'd give up on replacing the skylights in the roof yet again and just take out those skylights permanently. After seeing what they went through for three consecutive years, I didn't want a roof with skylights! Can you imagine their insurance premiums after filing claims for 3 years in a row for storm damage? Fort Worth itself never got hit by a tornado while I lived there, although we had them all around in outlying areas. The year we moved here was 1999 and, of course, OKC-Moore had that horrible tornado event. Then, in 2000, Fort Worth got hit by a tornado that came right over my brother's house before touching down less than a mile east of him. He was in the yard trying to make it to his car to drive east to check on his children at the high school band hall because he heard a tornadic cell was approaching. As it flew over his head and the treetops were swirling overhead, he realized the funnel was passing over his head up in the air. That was where the tornado touched down and did damage first---between his house and band hall. Luckily, the band director walked out the door with the kids as they all were leaving, saw the sky, and hustled them back inside and they were fine though the building had damage. Ever since that year, it seems like the D-FW area has had more tornadoes than I remember from when we lived there. Maybe it is just that I am paying more attention now that I am here and not there. When we put in our tornado shelter, we were the only ones in our neighborhood that had one. One by one, almost everyone else has put in either shelters or safe rooms, with our neighbors to the south getting theirs put in a couple of weeks ago. I love my tornado shelter. Just knowing it is there gives me a peace of mind I didn't have before. I would have been just like you last night, out there sticking those plants in the ground. This week's temperatures are perfect tomato plant weather. If I was a tomato plant right now, I'd be loving this weather and growing like crazy. Dawn

Mick, I'm glad the hail missed you too. Whenever I have a garden that looks darn-near perfect and has plants that are producing like crazy, that is usually when the hail hits. Hail never hits us here in a bad year (like last year) when everything looks pitiful and isn't doing so well. So, since the garden looks spectacular right now, I've been expecting baseball-sized hail. Our rainfall was slightly below normal for the year-to-date, but today's couple of inches really boosted our total for the year so far to about 13" or 14". For us, a good year is about 30" to 32", so 14" by this point in time isn't bad. The rain has been falling in small amounts like 0.02 one day and 0.37 another and 0.23 another, so getting 2.6 was wonderful. Having the temperatures about 15 degrees lower than yesterday was nice too. I'm expecting the plants to have another good growth spurt now that they finally got some water. We're supposed to get more rain tonight, but I'm not counting on it. We WERE NOT supposed to have rain this morning, so I figure we'll make up for it by not getting the rain forecast to fall tonight. Dawn