Category Archives: weather

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.

Engaging in a little light therapy in the old greenhouse, 4:00 on Sat. afternoon; 85*F and sunny.  (Light and wine therapy, I suppose, for me.)  The 5 gal. bucket holds melted snow, the cat is searching for voles, the dog is watching the cat and the child is happily watering the lettuces.

We had a bit of a thaw this weekend.  It got to be a record-setting 55*F on Saturday.  Though this is a nice change, it tends to make us all a bit stir-crazy and spring-willing.

I had not quite realized how much snow we had gotten until some of it melted.  There are now tufts of grass down at the bottoms of the paths that Tom had snowblown about the property:  the geese and turkeys have flown their pen in search of this greenery, and cannot be tempted to return until the sun goes down.  This is understandable.  But here’s a funny thing I hadn’t quite realized was happening until, well, until some of the snow had melted.

Have you ever miscalculated how many steps there were on a run of stairs and you stomped, searching for that last step that isn’t there?  It spooks you, doesn’t it, and your heart skips a beat.  Well.  The snow was so deep that, even in the areas we’d plowed, I was literally stepping down into every outbuilding, pen, garden, and greenhouse, and I had gotten used to it.  It’s kind of like a step had slowly grown at the entry into one’s living room, say, or one’s kitchen.  Well, I stepped out of the greenhouse, stomped, and nearly twisted an ankle.  Yipes!  No snow!

(And I can’t blame the wine because it was 8:00 a.m. at the time.)

Penny demonstrates that all girls like to feel pretty, even butchy farm dogs.

But like many girls, she hates having her picture taken, no matter how pretty she feels.

Things are so heavy and gloomy lately that I thought I would share this today.  Have a great weekend, y’all.

One thing is clear:  there will be more of this kind of greenery in our future.

I seem to be affected by a seasonal version of a need for a horizontal hold knob.  Remember back in the days of analog televisions?  You know, pre-cable, when the station wouldn’t quite tune in, and the image would flicker by fast, like pages flipping  in a book?  I kind of feel that the future is like that right now, no matter what the subject.  I can see the image, but it’s flickering by.

Maybe too much is expected of all of us in this season of Comfort and Joy.  Of course, I am the biggest Scrooge on the planet, at least according to my husband, so it could be that I am especially prone to dark clouds now.  So this inability to focus could simply be due to my lack of seasonal good cheer.

Maybe I just need more spiked eggnog.

Broccoli raab flower and seed pods this morning

On Sunday these flowers were heavy with honeybees.   Toward winter’s beginning I usually let the few things left in the veg garden go to flower if they wish.  The native flowers (asters, mainly) are long gone, so the veg garden’s calendula, rapini and snapdragons were the only blooms the pollinators could find.  With those 70* days last week, I am sure more than a few pollinators were out doing a last forage.  I sure was!

Our snowfall was fairly light yesterday, only enough to hide the grass completely.  I was hoping for more.  Today it’s bright and sunny and cold.  I believe I love snow so much because of its ability to magnify the sun’s feeble winter output:  there are a lot more reflective surfaces if snow clings to everything.  Even if we didn’t get dumped on, seeing what’s out there makes me happy, makes me want to bake bread and drink tea.  It makes me think it’s not the end of the garden season, it’s the beginning of these beautiful light-filled indoor days.

One has to look at the upside of spending life inside, no?

Not yet but soon enough

While pouring my coffee this morning, I heard the unmistakable, inevitable rumble rumble roar scrrrrrAPE that is the snowplow.  Ugh, I thought.  Idiot Driving Season is upon us.

What is it about normally sensible drivers and the first few snowfalls of the year?  How is it they forget the immutable:  driving in snow is plain different than dry conditions, than driving in the rain?  I suppose I am glad I live in the country, where my encounter with any drivers at all is limited, but I do need to get on the freeway with some regularity.  Thus, my early-morning cringe.

Otherwise, I am quite happy that snow is forecast.  The radio’s words “lake-effect bands of a foot or more in some places” were welcome to my ears.  Yes, I enjoy snow, and even cold.  I got lots of outdoor work done yesterday specifically because it was snowing off and on through the day.  (Working in freezing rain, see, is not so nice.)  But yesterday I got all the birds’ fences moved or restrung, and the windows are now hung in the coop.  Bring it on, I thought.

Oh the horror:  tomato waste

Doing fall garden cleanup, I am always so surprised how much green STUFF there is afterward.

Not that I am complaining (necessarily).  This is the time of year the compost piles get big:  big because of the normal input of fall cleanup, and big by design (bigger piles are more insulated, and thus will continue their happy warm rotting without freezing, all the quicker for spring’s compost needs).  So more stuff is definitely a good thing.

But apparently there’s a question about what kind of stuff hits the growing pile.

My friend Michele, on her pre-dinner tour of the garden last Saturday, said “What is it with you farmer types, and all these rotting tomatoes on the ground?”  (For our kids’ school last weekend, she headed up a gleaning event at a cool organic farm nearby:  they got lots of free tomatoes for salsa for the school.  Evidently she saw a lot of fallen tomatoes and it disheartened her.)  I tried to explain that real farmers like the Arboreals have real customers who don’t really appreciate a spotty tomato, so the fallen ones were probably rejects.  And for fake farmers like me, my family’s needs were met fairly early, so I yanked the plants.  (The ones she’d seen were in or near enough to the compost.  Sometimes my aim is bad.)

I did understand what she was getting at, though.  It wasn’t so very long ago that I was a city gardener with Every Tomato Is Precious etched on my garden consciousness.  An example:  In the Minneapolis garden, the first ear of corn I ever harvested was so positively priceless (though quite small) that I ran it to the kitchen and I…ate it raw.  Like so many things in this life, it is a question of scale.  My tomatoes are still precious, though at this point I don’t know them all personally.  I kind of wish I did:  that I had that kind of time, not necessarily that I need fewer tomatoes to get to know.

Next year, though, I don’t need as many tomatoes.  I’ve learned my lesson.

Slow and steady makes the web

This morning on the drive to school we saw the moon for the first time in what feels like weeks.  The kid has always been a bit moon fixated, and the surprise this morning was a nearly full one, peeking over the woods at us.

Thomas Friedman said global warming won’t come necessarily as something we’ll see in our daily lives but instead will be something the post office delivers:  higher energy and insurance bills.  It’s not so much global warming, he says, but global weirding.  And “weird” is one word a person could ascribe to this year’s weather in much of the U.S.

I tried not to think about the record rain we have had when I put my boots on this morning.  Records:  what do they really mean to me, I thought:  I have only been here four years and every year we appear to have a period of record rainfall.  Who cares if it’s a record.  Its effects are the same.  Lots of rain (or its opposite, or heat, or cold) are not exactly welcome.  If one is a gardener, one tends to lobby for moderation.  I do not appreciate this weekend’s exceptionalism.

So, boots on feet, I step lightly through the gardens, wondering what all that rain really means to us.  My coffee is warm but the air is damp and chilly, and the week’s sunny forecast can only be good news for what I see in the gardens.  I have to stop myself from going into crisis mode, the mode which one jumps to to bail out one’s basement, say; or grabs the pellet gun at the first shrill cry of the chickens.  Slow and steady, things will dry.  Time to sit back and wait.

I’m not very good at sitting and waiting, though.  With the financial crisis, climate change, this election…I am more jumpy than ever.

Chickens love their worms

My rain gauge says we have had 8.25″ of rain since Friday night.  My neighbor’s rain gauge says it’s more like 9.25″.  Either way, that’s a lot of rain.

“Could be worse,” neighbor said.  “If it were snow, we’d have about 90″ of the stuff.”

It’s good for worm hunting though.  And anytime is a good time to have a bagpiping session, no?

Friend Rob plays pipes:  moist weather is good for woodwinds, apparently

Baby radicchio in the seed-starting bed

The nights have been cool recently. Not sweater cool, but definitely it’s-moving-away-from-summer cool. I suppose that is okay, though as ever it catches me by surprise. Cool, already? When life is this busy, the days and weeks tend to slip by.

The cooler weather is great though for all those fall crops. Also, a lower night temperature means a lower soil temperature, so all my salad babies are sprouting and growing happily. Ah. Another week or so I can start pulling the determinate Bellstar Paste tomatoes and transplant salad stuff into the greenhouse. Yay! Salad. We’ve missed it.

Of course, though, I am in no rush for autumn to come. Salad or no salad.

putting sand on the compliant pooch

Kind of like the tomatoes being in the greenhouse until last week, our dog has kept her winter coat until just recently. The spring has been that cold. “We need to wash that dog,” we said. Which means “let’s go to the beach.”

As the crow flies, we are a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan. We are not crows, though, so must commute 3 miles to get there. Did you know that Michigan has more miles of shoreline than any other state? Any other state than Alaska, that is, that great categorical bell-curve buster. Anyway, it’s true. We’ve got lots of shoreline, lots of beautiful beaches.

It was this lake that drew me back here. I grew up on this lake; having sand at the foot of the bed was just a huge part of my childhood. I wanted it to be part of my own kid’s life, so…here we are.

Incidentally, blue heelers (which is mostly what Penny is, that, and a little neighbor dog thrown in) are not the greatest of water dogs. She’s enthusiastic, though, especially if heavy exercise is part of any project. That water Kong though is just great.

Brr!

The average last frost date in my area is the first day of May. Since we have lived here, there’s been a frost after that date, and sometimes weeks after that date. Is it time for an adjustment? Maybe it is, or at least this gardener needs to adjust her Can-Do gardening calendar.