I'm sorry to hear that. I heard near Charlotte they had tennis-ball-sized hail and downeast they had GRAPEFRUIT-SIZED hail!!!!! I would just die if something decimated my garden 2 years in a row. Glad yours is doing well!

Adellabedella, I love mammatus clouds and think they are the coolest-looking thing. We see them a lot down here along the Red River on severe T-storm type days. If I am in the garden and see them magically 'appearing' in the sky, I drop what I am doing and flip my fire radio over to the NOAA weather channel to listen to it for a while. If I see rapid T-storm development off to our west, south or southwest plus mammatus clouds, I go inside to check the NWS website and the radar. When you watch the weather closely, you soon learn which clouds are a cause for concern and which are not. Sometimes my storm spotter DH comes outside looks at the clouds and tries to drag my inside the house or at least voices his concern that I "should" come inside. Carol, I am sure they got all that rain. I watched their storms on radar all night long. After I attempted to go to sleep, the weather radio went off every 15 minutes for one of the storms out west. All I could think of was that I'd surely be celebrating the great rainfall if I lived there! They've been so dry for so long. And, no, our weather radio isn't set for that county because it is so far west, but it is set for counties closer to it, like Montague County in TX, and Jefferson, Carter and Garvin Counties in OK. A lot of the storms that were hitting Cotton County were eventually brushing parts of the counties we do have programmed into the radio, so the thing kept going off. I didn't sleep much and was tempted to turn the darn thing off but would never do that for safety reasons, of course. George, I'm glad you got rain. Y'all sure did need it. That's a bit too close for a funnel cloud though! Dawn

Yep.. its a little more than a dusting here too but should stop falling soon. temp on back porch is 21.... inside the hoop house its 28 with no heat source. Yesterday it got up to about 51 in there but the high was only 38 out in the open. I'm sure being protected from the snow and wind chill is a big help for what's in there. We'll see in a few days how they did. It should be a little warmer this afternoon --but still way to cold for me! Edit: I miss read the high for yesterday... thought it said 19 but it was actually 38.. so I changed it in the post above. This post was edited by melvalena on Thu, Feb 6, 14 at 10:33

Disappointing, isn't it, when all your hard work is undone. I had no idea there were areas with such winds, the "storm" that reached the Gold Coast just as we got back from Bris, sailed straight over the top with one or two rumbles and about 12 spots of rain. Amazing how localised conditions are. Just this afternoon I was driving home to Bris radio weather reports of "fine today" and the skies were as black as pitch every direction. It's thundering now, actually 13 drops have fallen, so the odds are "someone" is getting "something" but "somewhere else". Now back to you, what a pity you had not taken a "before" shot to impress your wife with how nice it HAD looked.