Three minutes of hail turn a bed of healthy eggplants into a row of leafless sticks, a bed of chard into leaf mulch, a bed of cucumbers into nothing at all. Three minutes of hail and ten weeks of labor are battered into the mud. The hours in the greenhouse seeding and potting on and thinning and watering. The hours on the tractor plowing and tilling and spreading compost and shaping beds and cultivating. The hours on the transplanter setting seedlings. The hours sowing rows of greens. The hours weeding with hoes and fingers. The hours setting up trellis and laying out row covers. A hundred and fifty hours of labor for every minute of hail, and all the effort is no match for the storm of half-inch ice balls hurtling down from their thunderhead.

We in Washington County will be dealing with the devastation of that late May storm for another month at least. It is remarkable what a little plant can survive, but the spring pea crop will be sparse at best. The gaps in the rows of endive and cabbage will remain until we clean out the beds and till in the stalks. We lost half the currants. The kale won't recover until September. The eggplants won't recover.

It didn't help that from that one super cell and the six other thunderstorms that came through that day we got five inches of rain. Aside from washing away yards of topsoil - there's a foot-deep gully through the onion patch - the deluge kept us out of the field for a week, a week when we could not weed or plant. In the potato patch, the perennial grasses and bull thistles made the most of their reprieve. The beans went in late; at the earliest we will get a first crop by the end of the month.

But the tomatoes have thrived. I would like to report that they are hail proof. I would be happy to think that any plant is hail proof. However, now that I have seen 50-foot-tall maples stripped of their leaves and fields of alfalfa mowed bare by hail, I doubt it. So, no, these are not Teflon tomatoes. They are heavily protected tomatoes. We planted them in our two big greenhouses, which, though I would not have counted on it, are, I am delighted to report, hail proof. Not only were the tomatoes unscathed, they actually enjoyed the irrigation supplied by the flood waters running between the rows.

I should have planted everything in greenhouses. With three inches of compost on the ground and a clear plastic tunnel overhead, you can grow beautiful, healthy, nearly pest-free greens and never give the weather a thought - at least until a strong nor'easter plucks the plastic right off the steel frame. I should have planted everything in greenhouses. Obviously I wish I had. Of course, I would have needed another ten of them, and at $5,000 a piece it would have been a hefty price to pay for piece of mind and a first planting of cucumbers.

A hefty price, I should point out, not just for me, but for my customers too. This is a business, not a hobby. Anybody who plants four acres of organic vegetables as a hobby should have his head examined. It is possible that anyone who plants four acres of organic vegetables as a business should get a psychiatric evaluation too, but I am not crazy enough yet to think that if I have to spend $50,000 to save my crops from destruction I won't also have to charge more for those crops. If I install an espresso machine on my tractor, I do not expect my customers to pay for that. Greenhouses, however, are becoming less a luxury than a necessity. I believe I will have to put up more and more of them if I want to stay in farming, for the simple reason that the weather is getting nastier.

As every farmer knows, the weather has always been terrible, and we have been complaining about it for eons. The story of the biblical flood could easily be the too credulous reporting of gloomy comments by some ancient Edomite farmer suffering through a wet spell. While I am not ready to suggest that the species line up two by two just because we had five inches of rain in a day, I do think we ought to start accepting that we are going to pay a price for having indulged in a 50-year fossil fuel orgy that has altered the earth's atmosphere. And part of that price will be for the greenhouses that I and other farmers will need in order to protect the food we grow from the ravages of increasingly violent weather spawned by a heating planet. On the bright side, you will be able to torture your grandchildren with stories of how when you were young cucumbers only cost 33 cents apiece.