We've got an overcast day and it
sprinkled a little this morning. At first glance you might think our field looks okay, but
it isn't. A lot has happened since Saturday. We had a severe hail
storm Saturday night and it damaged our plants.
This is a view of a our marked
area and I think you can see there aren't as many leaves as there was on
Saturday. Let's take a closer look.
This is the same plant that we looked at last
week. Compare this picture with
Saturday's picture. Where’s the first trifoliolate leaf? The hail
stripped it from the stem. The second trifoliolate leaf has grown
since Saturday. There’s only one unifoliolate leaf remaining.
The hail knocked the other one off. And the growing point has been
damaged. Will this plant die? What do you think? We’ll have to
watch it to find out.
This is another plant in our marked area. You can see the
first trifoliolate leaf is gone from this plant too. But the
growing point (future leaves) is still intact unlike the last
picture. You can see the third trifoliolate leaf starting to
unfold under the second trifoliolate leaf. This plant is in better
shape than the previous plant.
This plant
isn't in our area, but I thought we should look at it too. This
plant was much smaller than the two previous plants. It lost its
trifoliolate leaf and one unifoliolate leaf. Is it going to
survive? If you look closely at the axils (The axil is where the
leaf stem or petiole attaches to the main stem.) of the
unifoliolate leaves you can see small green leaves starting to
grow. Those will be branches. So, yes, this plant is going to
survive. Had you worried there for a minute, didn't I?
