Category Archives: weather

Occupational hazard:  a farm girl’s glasses will fog when she goes from 40 outside to 85 in

I don’t know about you, but I have found this mild winter very enjoyable.  Perhaps it’s the memory of those long winters spent in Minnesota.   Every Minnesotan has “I lived through the cold” stories, but I don’t know many people who had to get their car’s manual transmission gear fluid changed:  despite its being garage-kept, I couldn’t get it in reverse or first gear when the cold was in extremis.  So I humbly accept any day the mercury doesn’t go below 30 with gratitude.

This weather has come with unexpected downsides, though.  One, the animals are just messed up.  Chickens want to sit their many eggs.  Earl the tom turkey is feeling love in the air, so Ruby spends her days hiding from him under the back deck’s picnic table.  (Luckily, the hose remains unfrozen so I am able to clean up after her, but I do feel her pain.)  The fuzzy goats are happy to be outside, but that’s mud between their hooves…not pleasant.  And here in the Fruit Belt there is gloomy talk that fruit won’t set without the usual extended hard frosts of normal winter.

It’s also had an unexpected downside for the resident gardener.  That spring panic that normally hits in April?  You know, when you can’t seem to finish any one project because they all beckon?  It’s here now, in February.  Sigh.

Gratuitous photo #1:  new kitten Blossom

Gratuitous photo #2:  Blossom’s sister Scarlett enjoys the front porch’s space heater

Because it has been such a slow slide into winter, I have been in denial that the frozen-ground, the-garden’s-truly-dead period comes along with the season.  But it’s arrived here, and our first snow (normally dumped then melted) has stayed and stayed.  Ugh.  The dark days.

Can you find Chicken Patty?  Some chickens are Rhodes scholars, some are just dumb.  Patty’s in the smart camp because she managed to negotiate the 7′ high fence around the garden…and is harvesting worms from underneath the sheet mulch.

It’s tough work chopping carrots out of the ground.

But it’s quite toasty in the old greenhouse.

Everything has been put to bed, under covers……and as you can see, things are still bright and fresh in here.  If you look closely you’ll see I have been successively taking the outside leaves of each plant for my customers’ and our own salads.

And as you can see, they’re quite tempting.  I think I will make it through winter just fine.

Green tree frogs (Hyla versicolor and H. chrysocelis) live in the liner of our pool

It felt great putting on a light sweater to go milk the goats this morning.  Am I a bad person for wishing for summer’s end?  Or maybe just a bad gardener?  This summer, however, was for the record books.  And I don’t like to live my life by making records.  (Let the whining begin!)

The small person is big on little frogs

Normal years have us hitting ninety maybe three days a year.  This year topped 13.  Yes:  I shouldn’t complain, as Michigan doesn’t get hurricanes or Texas-sized droughts…we’re not even prime for earthquakes, and we live too close to Lake Michigan for tornadoes to hit us.  Somehow that doesn’t matter when there’s enough personal drama that even record rains and heat don’t register.  But sayonara, Summer.  I’ve had it with your drama, weather and otherwise.

Gotcha!

(The pool is the concession I made to my husband years ago when I told him we can’t use the a/c any longer.  It is pleasant, and it helps maintain marital peace.)

It’s usually the second week of August where most newbie gardeners give up the ghost and leave their gardens to the weeds.  I may be no newbie, but it’s been a tough year in the epic weed/bug battle and it’s left me a bit frustrated.  I have the CSA folks to grow for now too and can I say that my fifth planting of summer squash might bear fruit this year?  Yes.  The rest of you might be swimming in zucchini…and I am officially jealous.

The budding herpetologist.

So I am thankful for my determinate tomatoes, the Bellstar Paste:  you gotta love a plant that doesn’t sprawl, is the first to set fruit and is also over and done by the third week of August.  Oh, how happy I am when I pull those plants!  Others come out too and I find myself in a flurry again, adding compost, reseeding, pulling out nonperfomers:  if summer was a wash for some things, then it stands to reason that autumn will be wonderful.  Gardeners are nothing if they’re not hopeful.

And I’ve got hope, lots of hope.

Ground cloth/weed blocker makes a good shade cloth for tender lettuces

Ping/bang/scrape, buzzz….ping/bang/scrape…buzz:  it’s got to be summer, I can no longer deny it.  The June bugs hit the screen of our bedroom window as I sit reading every night in the light of the nightstand lamp.  June, already?  Yes.

I have learned to ignore or at least tune out the clanging gong of the seasonal imperatives this late spring/early summer.  How can I not?  With everything clamoring to be The First Priority, isn’t it easier to stay in bed, or maybe go to the beach?

15′x60′ addition is at least fenced and tilled:  garden beds need to be installed and filled and, well, planted

Yes, I am trying hard to take my own advice:  it’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Winter’s late stay, spring’s sodden unhappiness…these things do affect what comes out of the ground, including what should be going into it, and when.  So indeed the garden expansion is two months behind.  So be it!  Corn in September, not August; beans in August, not July.

Besides:  wouldn’t you just rather be a kid, and play?  Or at least sit down and watch one do so?  Eleven day old baby Ivy with mama Cricket, out to pasture

Nothing like a little April SNOW shower

Winter danced in and out before it settled in, and spring apparently feels the need to do the same.  That’s fine.  I find I am still behind, gardenwork-wise, so a late start to the season is to my advantage.

Not that I am wishing a late season on the rest of you, of course!

The lake, yesterday

We spent part of a snowy Sunday afternoon attending a school event.  I discovered in that funny way one has of thinking “I am the only person to think this way” that indeed, it isn’t just students who hope for snow days.  Parents do a fair amount of wishing too.

“Spoon under your pillow tonight,” said one.  “Oh no:  wear your underwear inside-out,” said another.  “Do both,” said a third.

Well, school is in session today, but we’re at home.  And I am glad.

It is pretty miserable outside right now.  I won’t get into the tit-for-tat description but let’s just say going about in the dark to do the milking and then animal chores was not its usual pleasant undertaking.  But all the animals are warm, fed, watered and happy, and have adjusted themselves to this colder world.  They move around a lot less, eat a bit more.  Just like we humans, come to think of it.

Does anyone else have a hard time adjusting to winter?  I don’t mean, necessarily, adjusting to the cold, for that will happen with a bit of time.  I mean simply that I have a hard time managing all this free time I seem suddenly to have once the snow comes to stay.  My weekends are filled instead with…laundry!  housecleaning!  ugh.

I much prefer getting dirty to getting clean, I guess.

May all your snow days be warm and toasty, with plenty of snow shoeing, sledding, hot cocoa and keeping warm.

It’s 2:40 behind…

I’ve figured out the secret to getting more time in the garden!

It’s simple:  let your garden clock get blown down in a rainstorm and let its back fill with rain.

Way back when I felt that every minute spent away from our toddler was a huge motherhood sin, I installed a cheap kitchen clock on the garage wall within full view of the gardens.  And it’s been a wonderful clock.  Thriftily, it uses one double-A battery per year, and its time has been reliably accurate (to my dismay: when I needed more time it didn’t give it to me, of course).  I noticed it had wound down last week so I took it down (I can jump to reach it), replaced the battery, then I never bothered to find a ladder to reinstall it.  (I didn’t have time to, you see.)  So of course at the first puff of wind it fell off the sill where I had placed it and then got drenched.

Now, it keeps completely wild time!  When I took this photo, it was noon.  Garden time, right?  Too bad nobody else lives by it.

Our daughter was hospitalized on Easter.  Long story short, she became dehydrated after a bout of stomach upset, so we spent some long anxious hours with her in the ER and then overnight in a room.   All it took, really, was 24 hours of IV fluids and some oxygen and she was back to normal.  And:  she was STARVING.

After actually reading BOTH fish AND macaroni and cheese on the hospital menu for lunch, she scarfed both down, completely, scarily, today.  We’re home now and the only person I am trying to keep out of the Easter candy is myself; even in extremis she’s not a sweets-eater.  She of course gets anything she wants for dinner tonight, and she called in another seafood order.  Okay, I thought; large carbon footprint on tonight’s dinner, but there has to be something to offset it.

Actually looks big from this angle

It’s been hot here for the past week.  I thought I might check one particular patch of the garden and indeed I was rewarded.  Asparagus is probably her favorite vegetable.  It was a tiny harvest (the first ones always are), but it was more than enough for the small person.

A bit of Florida sunshine in my cloudy Michigan kitchen

Our winter has been a fairly “regular” winter this year, unlike in other places.  The only thing I have noticed that has been slightly different is it has not gotten terribly cold, or windy…good for the home-heating bill, frankly; we’ll squeak by on one 250-gal. tank if all’s well.  But I am itchy for spring.  Maybe it’s the unending predictions of “lake-effect snow” which means we’ll get 5″ where others get but a whisper, maybe it’s because I know it’s nearly March but it feels like the last week of January, maybe…it’s because the kids aren’t here yet.

I am perennially looking for signs of spring.  My sighting of that robin yesterday means nothing:  he’s been here all winter.  I haven’t heard the whooping cranes flying north above us yet, I haven’t had a decent day to either tap the maples or trim the fruit trees and grape vines.  I, in other words, am in a winter funk.

The only sign of spring so far is that the turkeys, both of them, are horny.

SO!  If life hands you lemons, well…what to do?  Tom came home with three bags of organic lemons “on super sale, I know you don’t go in for the imported things but maybe we can make a lot of lemonade.”  Lemonade, bah!  Many of these will become lemon curd before the weekend is out.

In about a month, I might actually be able to find the paths in the garden again, too (butternut squash, beans, and grapes at the top)

Happy September equinox, everyone.

Depending on your hemisphere, this means it’s either the first full day of spring or the first full day of autumn for us all.  Fall, in the days before my greenhouses, was a point on the calendar where I felt the most mortally vulnerable.  Ack!  All my plants are winding down and dying on me, I would think…and I am of course winding down too!  But, now that I am a year-round gardener, the end of one thing simply means the beginning of another.  Bye-bye tomatoes, hello turnips.  Hello, escarole; see you next year, peppers.  And look at the promise of all those little seedlings!

What I need to remind myself is that the beginning of fall is not the end of something, it’s the balance of the calendar.  Equal day and night and all that, no extremes, just a slow slide into darker days, a slow fade from the time of doing outdoor chores in the light-filled 10:00 evenings.  And darker days mean more time with the oven turned on, as I am more inclined to bake and roast and make pots of stew, cure and smoke meats, and, of course, take care of the bounty that is Apple Season.

I do adore the smell of autumn, though:  the high sweetness of the ripe grapes and apples, the fecund mustiness of fallen leaves, the acrid whiff of burning leaves and woodsmoke.  It might not hold the verdant promise of spring within its scents but it does hold its own promise:  a bountiful Harvest, and thanksgiving.

Can’t you just smell the applesauce bubbling on the stove?

Lights on September 11th, with me and the child atop an adjacent roof deck

It’s so fun to get away from the farm!  Quite hilariously, everyone we saw suggested completely non-urban things to see:  the High Line, Governors’ Island (free ferry), Central Park.  No, we insisted:  we need dirty sidewalks and jostling people and street vendors and no nature, thanks.  Other than the fact that it. rained. every. single. day, mostly all day, we had a good time.  Tom’s show was fun.  It runs until October 10th, so go see it!

(The above picture:  there’s a memorial held about 5 blocks south of the World Trade Center site atop a parking garage.  It’s pretty moving, as the columns really do look like the original buildings, albeit lots skinnier and taller.  Our friends invited us for dinner that evening; they live in Battery Park City facing this site.  And:  it stopped raining long enough for us to go up to the roof to see it.)

Girl with bag of booty on the TKTS stair

The one crummy thing about constant rain is that short people like a certain five-year-old I know will not be able to stay dry under a parent-held umbrella.  One trip to the Hello Kitty store in Times Square rectified this:  a nice bright yellow poncho kept her nice and dry.

Greenhouse-grown ratatouille fixings

I am not sure about all of you, but August’s garden kicked my butt.

This entire year in SW Michigan has been as strange, weather-wise, as it has been elsewhere in the US.  So sure, let’s pick an easy scapegoat:  the weather!  Nothing I can do about the weather but complain, right?  But no.  Sure it was hot, sure it rained a lot, sure there were weather-related events stringing together long before August that worked against this gardener’s interests.  But other things conspired to keep me busy in places other than the garden this month.

And I suppose that’s it:  we’re always going to have obligations other than weeding the garden, right?  Than just getting out there and doing the daily tasks necessary to keep things running smoothly?

As Year Five of a summer garden, Year Two of a year-round one, I am getting a handle on any season’s ebbs and flows.  And what I realize now is this:  August is a busy time.  Busy for weeds, busy for bugs, busy for the human inhabitants of this farm.  If I am ever to come to a place of happiness with the August garden, I need to realize the limits of my time and try to use the warmth and enthusiasm of August’s weather to my advantage.  So: what does this mean?

It means that next year, nearly the only things I will have growing in the outdoor garden in August will be dry beans, corn, and winter squash!  They require NONE of my precious time.  I’ll have the fall-started crops, but I’m planning on cutting way back on summer squash, beets, and canning (green) beans.

So!  Tomatoes, cucumbers, take heed:  you will all be either July or September crops, no exceptions!

(do you think the tomatoes will listen to me?)

Wet Swedish Fingerlings, aching for harvest

I admitted to a friend of mine that I have been having some episodes of insomnia lately.  My cause for worry?  Not global warming, not the health-care fiasco, not a terrorist attack.  Nope.  I was worried about my potatoes.

What’s to worry about potatoes?  Plant one in the ground, you get back 8-10 potatoes:  that kind of math should cause me no worries, right?  Well, true to form, our August has been a wet one.  And wet soil can mean rotten potatoes.  So every nightly thunderstorm, every nightly sprinkle, CLICK my eyelids flash open and I worryworryworry.

The first year the skies opened up in August I was told “this is highly unusual.”  Normally our Augusts see about 4″ of rain, nothing to sneeze at, but every year since I was apprised of what is “normal” we have had, in some instances, more than twice that number, sometimes on the same weekend.*  And here, the last day of August, we’re 3″ above normal.  Time to get the spuds out of the ground, and it’s time to find the time to do so.

(*If something happens four years in a row, isn’t that, well, NORMAL?  Like most things, I think we need to adjust our thinking.)

It’s a pity.  Leaving them in the ground (without rain, that is) is a great way to store them.  I would simply harvest them before the frost.  Ah well.  I have harvested about 75% of them and, well, I can now sleep at night!

We’ve lived in our house for five springs now, and only twice have we had a full bloom on the tree wisteria in the side yard.  Usually frost gets the young blossoms, whose flowering coincides with that of the apricots and plums; when the wisteria blossoms die, so too does the hope for a big harvest (or any harvest at all) from these lovely stone fruits.  This year, we have blooms.

This picture doesn’t do it justice.  The smell is delicately sweet.

And of course the blossoms are gorgeous.

Here’s hoping this turns out to be a fruitful year!  I *adore* apricot jam, don’t you?  Or plum jam, or dried apricots AND plums, and clafoutis, and dicing them up in salads, and and and…

That is the question!

But I’m ready!  Tomatillo blossom

My non-scientific answer to that question is to ask myself, well, will the plant sulk?  Our normal temperature range at this time of year is highs in the low 70s and lows in the low 50s, but there is still the rare potential for frost and an even rarer instance where it could get to be 80.  This range, then, is not ideal for the heat-loving solanaceae family (peppers, tomatoes, eggplants).  It’s even worse for cucumbers and beans.

SO, I wait.  It’s hard! Especially when I didn’t have the greenhouses to distract me, this time of year is one spent waiting and watching the 10-day forecast.  Hard work, this waiting, this watching your lovingly tended seedlings grow more and more leggy and spindly.  But it is best for the plants.  Get them in the ground and they either become victims of those munching creepy crawlies or are simply done in, fainting like corseted Victorian maidens.  Or they survive.

But Thursday is Plant It Out day in our school gardens, so I will be “risking it” with okra, tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, and those really fainting- and sulking-prone eggplants.  So, cross your fingers for us.  Unlike here at home, we’ve got the school calendar tick-tocking away on us.  Some plants might just have to sulk.

Saved from the frost!

Things are proceeding apace this spring, despite the small fact that it’s been a very chilly season this year.  I occasionally listen to Chicago Public Radio and am always struck by how much warmer it is on that side of the lake:  Lake Michigan is cold, see, and casts us still in its chilly embrace.  This “lake effect” is responsible for our humongo snowload, as well as our cool springs and summers; on the flipside, we’ve got warm falls and winters (comparatively speaking, of course).  I just have to hold on and keep wearing warm clothes.

I have not been tempted to put anything into the ground in the gardens yet.  “Anything” means anything leafy, actually; there are peas and favas growing greenly outside.  I also have some onion plants that I set out in a fit of madness.  Last night, I expected one of our last remaining killing frosts.  Blankets over those new asparagus stalks:  I didn’t want to lose our first potential harvest.

So, I have simply settled for the dirt of the greenhouses.  There’s so much growing in there for both our use and for the school garden that I am not tempted to rush the outdoor gardens at all.

Sunday, and today

The warmup continues here.  The heat is off, and it was in the low 60s last night at the time supper was ready to be eaten:  I was seriously tempted to set up a  table outside.

Front to back: Maggie, Pauline and Bloody Beatrice working the Three Sisters beds

Everyone is stir-crazy.  All the chickens escaped their pen and–don’t knock the bird-brain–ran right into the garden 100′ away.  I had no idea they were out, and, rounding the corner to see the garden, I thought I’d been hit by a plague of rabbits or something.  Nope; just chickens.  Worms are easily found below the mulch on the tops of the raised beds.

You know, though, it’s lots easier to get your chores done when you can actually feel your fingers.  I got lots of outdoor work done (fence-fixing, repairing the coop door, compost-turning) and it felt really great.  Surely this warm weather won’t last, but it was nice to visit.