Hail Damage on potato leaf dwarfs

[ABlindHog]

One thing you can count on in this part of Texas is a hail storm or two every spring. The damage in the garden can be serious but tomatoes usually come through it OK. Tomato foliage is flexible enough to bend but not break for the most part, and it takes a direct hit to break the more brittle branches. This year I decided to try a few dwarf tomatoes, and put out two each of Summer Sunrise, Sweet Scarlet, and Dwarf Purple Heart. The rugose leaves on these plants are very impressive. Instead of the wispy foliage normally associated with hearts Dwarf Purple Heart looks upright and sturdy and is a great looking plant. Summer Sunrise and Sweet Scarlet are potato leafed plants with huge substantial looking leaves, some as large as my hand. The size of those leaves and the doubling of their surface area from the rugose texture will surely make them very efficient energy collectors. Then we had our first hail storm of the year. It wasn't a very bad one either, about 30 minutes of pea sized hail just before midnight. The next morning I went out to check on the garden and found that of my 25 tomato plants only one Big Beef had lost a couple of branches. The potato leafed dwarfs were another story. Each of those big beautiful leaves had about a dozen holes big enough to stick my little finger through. the same characteristics that made them so impressive also made them highly susceptible to hail damage. The plants may replace some leaves and recover but those damaged leaves will surely all be lost and the plants have been set back, probably by several weeks.