Making Lemonade from Lemons

 When the sky pelts us with enough hailstones to collapse the extension to our vegetable tunnel, and freeze our lettuce and tomato plants, it's time to make lemonade from lemons.

Gather up a cup of clean hailstones, pour over grape syrup to taste, stir vigorously, and enjoy your hail slushy.

Considering that we drink borehole water, breathe road dust daily, and eat what we grow, the infinitesimal pollutants in the hailstones are unlikely to harm us. There is an Afrikaans saying here in South Africa, 'Wat nie dood maak nie, maak vet'. (What doesn't kill you makes you fat)

A frugally minded friend collects buckets of hail, stores them in her freezer and uses them to ice the vegetables that she is blanching. It saves the effort of freezing lots of ice in the first place. My freezer is too full of garden harvests to do that, but it's a cool idea.