I feel for you buddy. Hail is the one least predictable thing about gardening. Maybe you can salvage your plants with a little pruning. At least you know hail is almost like lightening, not too many times does it strike in the same place.

I'm right down the road from you near Bragg. Both my daughters got hail at their places, one pea sized and one golf ball sized. I'm right in the middle of them and I got nodda. Heck of a season of heat and storms.

Anywise, if yours don't survive, I seriously have plants to share from Naga, hot kil, to more mild. I plan on having a seed/plant exchange at my place end of July/early August...let me know if your interested.

But hopefully all yours will bounce back!

Thanks for the kind words rockguy. Thank you Lorabell for the offer. I'm amazed by the kindness and sincerity of the people who congregate here. I have some ugly plants this morning, but they are all still alive. I hope they can recover. Several of them lost branches and leaves. I know plants are extremely resilient, so hopefully in a week or two, I'll be back on track. By the way, I had 2 brothers in the army. They were at several places, but I think they spent most of their time at Fort Hood in Texas. I was in the USMC and spent virtually all my time at Camp Lejune.

Yes, while you can definitely call it a big setback, if you prune off the damaged branches, more than likely, they will come back in force and maybe produce better than they normally would. Your biggest issue at this point is your length of growing season. My guess is that zone 7b will give you ample time to get a nice crop from your damaged plants before the season ends for you.

Sorry to hear about mother nature smacking your "kids" around peppernovice.

We don't get much "bad" weather here---especially in the summer, but I cage all my chiles/peppers with tomato cages anyhow. They're cheap and work great for the wind and when the plants get heavy with fruit. I don't know if plants would hold up golf ball-sized hail, but they survive in some pretty windy autumn conditions.

Good luck.

Thanks for the advice woohooman. I've tried those cages for tomatoes, but they didn't work that well. I might have better luck with chiles.

Wow! I took the pictures in the link( will they ripen before the plant falls) and not 30 minutes later we got our second hail storm in 3 days. I'm either going to have no plants at all, or the toughest plants in the state! Do they have MMA for chile plants?

Dang, sorry to hear that. We desperately need rain up here but certainly not in the form of hail.
Bruce

Peppernovice:

Yeah. I still cage my tomatoes also, but that's only good for the 1st 4' of growth or so---then I start staking

But those 42" thru 54" cages are excellent for chiles--even for the bushier types like habaneros and especially for the thinner branched(serranos,etc) and heavy-fruited like bells, anaheims, pablanos, etc.