I was just shedding a tear or two over my Habanero plants that have gotten some slightly torn leaves after excessive rain, but that is brutal, man! I feel your pain :(

Really I feel sorry to see the unfortunate plant but I think it has potential to recover/bounce back very soon. If I were you I would bring inside before the "evil hail". May be you have a lot of plants or may not have enough space. It could happen to anyone.

For me I see the weather forecast everyday and accordingly I manage my plants.

Take care of over water from the hail, she will be back soon.

Good luck.

Caelian

She'll bounce right back:)

@ Caelian: I have the same practice of following the forecast and acting accordingly. However, our weather had been completely crazy for the past 10 days or so, and forecasts have been misleading. Our June day temperatures are usually in upper 20s to 30 C (77-86 F). Today, max was 16 C (61 F), tomorrow we'll have max 17 C...
Hail storm wasn't expected and the sound of it woke me up. I've managed just to shut a few windows and it was already over, 4-5 minutes or so. Even though the ice was smaller than pea, it was very dense and violent, dropping down at an angle of nearly 135 degrees (180 degrees being the normal vertical drop), due to strong wind.
The rest of my peppers took the beating too. The ones in containers had it slightly worse than the ones in the ground (has to do with the angle of falling and various obstacles around my garden).

Chocolate Habanero:

And the rest of my container superhots, sheltered later that evening (you can even see the sun shining, after a few hours). The ones in the ground will have to manage.
Hopefully it will get more stable and warmer soon, my second concern now is low day and night temps for recovery.

Thank you for your support people.

Djole

That blows!

One consolation -- I saw some pics of peppernovice's plants after hail damage last year and his bounced back to be a helluva lot better looking than mine. And we don't even have RAIN here in the summer.

As I've heard some of the experts on GW say, "it's hard to kill a pepper plant."

:)

Kevin

Djole, it could be happened to me too. Still they look good. What do you feed them, the leaves are awesome.

I agreed with Kevin.

Caelian

Sadly i dont have any pictures prior to hail, they had awesome foliage (huge leaves), which makes it that much worse now :) I used Tref (Jiffy group) peat substrate in containers, with osmocotes for berries (11-11-19 with microelements). Later in the season i feed them Yara Ferticare (14-11-25), they had just 1 shot of it so far.
Here's a picture of a leaf, 1 month ago:

Kevin.....You have a good memory!

Djole.... I went through 2 or 3 hail storms last year. My plants actually looked worse than your plants do. They all bounced back. It only took a couple of weeks, and you could hardly tell there was any damage at all. I'm sure you'll be fine. Good Luck!

Tim

Yes, hail sucks, wrecked my garden early last July from a huge fall of marble-size hail, and while some plants were lost forever (lettuce for example), others recovered and many even went on to produce some of the best yields ever. So I think in a few weeks you won't even notice the damage.

And I'm surprised at so much damage from pea-sized hail... we get hail here quite often, usually pea-size, and at pea-size I assume no more damage than a hard rain. We had pea-size hail last week but there is zero damage to my peppers that sat out in it...

@ Kevin & Tim, thanks for consolation, it really does make me feel better!

@ don555, I suppose the intensity and strong wind made it into a shredding machine.

This post was edited by Djole on Tue, Jun 4, 13 at 7:07

Recovery - 10 days later, Moruga from the 1st picture (noticable new growth):

New growth on chocolate habanero:

New growth on Jolokia:

Jalapenos recovering:

Looks like you're on the quick track to recovery. Pretty soon you'll be better than you were before the hail!

Tim