Garden Update: Radish Recipes Anyone???

 

As you can see, our garden is growing up to be pretty big.  We pulled our first radish today and the rain we have been getting is treating the plants wonderfully!  Now, the real question is What on earth do I do with a Radish???  Radish recipes, anyone???

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring (3 inches in 24 hours!!)

We are starting to get our rainy season here in the dusty city we call home.  Our spring storms come and go and almost always carry dust with them.  Sometimes when it rains it is raining mud–quite interesting really.  Last night when the rain was heading our way, we had just gotten out of the van (we went and ate dinner at Rosa’s–yummy!)  I thought a wall of dirt was coming toward us  and I commented to Doc, “Oh, great.  Here comes the dust storm.”  We were trying to get the garage door closed when we realized it was actually rain.  This has happened to me two times where I saw a “wall” of something and it ended up being something completely different.  One time we were driving to Lowe’s and nearly stopped and turned around because we saw a dark wall of something (we thought it might be a tornado) coming toward us.  Now, I have never actually “seen” a tornado, so I am sure that to a more experienced person, this sounds hilarious, but to me it looked like a tornado. 

Anyway, with the much needed rain (3 inches in 24 hours)–we got this:

Looks like snow, huh?  It is hail.  Here is a closeup:

Big Brother thought the show was quite cool.  It was his first chance to ever get up close to hail.  He thought it was cold and wanted to go out into it.  We had to tell him that walking out into the hail would hurt because it would bop him on the head and give him an owie. (like the little kid talk?)

I noticed for the first time that hail has a “core”–the layers of the ice are frozen over each other.  I had never realized that before.  The “scientist” in me had to learn a little more about this because I wanted to get an explanation.  I found this really cool animation: 

http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/visualizations/es1805/es1805page01.cfm?chapter_no=visualization

I love learning new things like this–I am such a nerd!! 

Oh, and I went to check on the garden after the hail storm.  I discovered that our vegetables are quite hardy!!  Only 1 broken leaf.  I imagined a garden that was destroyed and felt bad because Big Brother would be sad.