You hear quite a lot of “freezing rain” warnings over the course a year around here, but it’s something you seldom actually SEE. If you’re driving, it means treacherous invisible ice on the roads. Otherwise, it seems like…rain. This morning, the freezing rain was a little more interesting, a fairly fine, steady drizzle that more or less froze to most surfaces on contact, coating them with ice. Here’s how it looked through the glass window of the east-facing greenhouse door. Outside, that’s the farm stand (reflected, that’s me, hooded, and the hoophouse ribs)… If you’ve ever played with Photoshop, this is the REAL version of one of the basic special effects—except here you can’t play with the settings… ;) Kinda cool, and the sort of thing you pay attention to when you’re obsessively watching the weather forecasts, waiting for the rainy, cloudy cold snap to break (Tuesday?!) so the field can dry out, so you can get on with tilling, and seed those first PEAS already. Freezing rain!!!
Weather
Drying out
Muted browns and greens are the colors of drying out. The wait for the snow to go is over, now, it’s waiting for the soggy soil to dry enough to till. Until then, there’s not much to do in the field other than walkaround and lookat future things to do. Lots of rock picking, lots of tilling in winter-killed crop residue (kale, Brussels sprouts, etc) and cover crops. Hoses to repair and run. PEAS to seed… I moved a couple of trays of onions and a tray of parsley to the greenhouse today, to see how they’ll do. No reason not to’ve moved all of them out, but, well, the rest can wait a couple more days, it’s supposed to be subzero the next few nights. The giant puddle that had nearly half the garlic underwater was gone by this morning…and the garlic under there was doing better than in the rest of the beds! That’s interesting, probably a combination of them stretching for more light, and the accumulated extra nutrients from being in a runoff collection spot. But it COULD have to do with just being underwater for a while. A discovery? Flood your garlic patch like a…rice paddy? Well, maybe not…
Melt-off complete!
Well, it’s done! Four days of steady melting, from Saturday to late this afternoon, and the main snow coverage, which had been up to a foot (30cm) deep in parts of the field on Friday, is gone. The small pics are from Saturday, Sunday and Monday late afternoon. Huge puddles remain today, twice the usual of the last three years, and they’ll take more than the usual couple of days to seep away. There’s a big pile of snow this side of the greenhouse, shouldn’t have plowed that snowbank there, I’ll probably break it up with the Kubota compact tractor. And there’s the remains along the fence line, that shrinks at its own slow, protected pace. For most of the garden, drying out is underway. Cool!
Ah, SPRING!
Man, what a difference a day and a bunch of degrees can make! The temperature didn’t exactly shoot up, but it went from hovering around daytime zero, to around 10°C (50°F). This was one weather trend, predicted on the 15-day-forecast weather site, that I figured wouldn’t suddenly go south (it’s gotta warm up sometime), so I’ve been waiting for it, to the day, for a couple of days now. It’ll get steadily warmer for a week or so, than maybe drop a bit, but even if we get another BLIZZARD, the ground will have warmed up enough that new snow won’t be able to stick around for long. So, I do believe, SPRING IS HERE!!!
I woke up to sunshine, and without even checking the temperature or confirming the forecast, set up a table outside the Milkhouse and out went the leek, onions and parsley for a little rapid hardening off. Getting them out to the greenhouse in a couple of days will free up a lot of rack space!
Wandering around the field a bit, checking the melt-off’s progress, I poked around the edge of the Jerusalem artichoke bed. The ground was still fairly frozen, and had melted to clayey muck only in spots. Poking around in a soft spot at the base of one of the plants, I came up with a handful! First harvest! The tubers look beautiful, the ones in the front of the pic about marble size, the biggest in the back, like a golf ball. As seed stock, there’s going to be a ton from the 45 pieces planted last year. I didn’t end up harvesting any in the fall; now, I’ll get to for the first time eat ’em!
Herbs return
Sage and thyme don’t look like much as they roll out from under the snow, but they’re good to see. Another chilly day, slightly above zero, but COLD. Still, the sunny days lately have been heating things up, and the snow is slowly receding. It’s pulled back from around the greenhouse, and it’s starting to retreat over the herb patch (that’s sage and thyme at the far end). The REAL melt-off starts tomorrow…!
Spring comes Saturday!
Proper spring begins Saturday! I’m positive. Meanwhile, here’s today’s barren view from the bench, facing west, just outside the greenhouse. After a long summer’s day working in the field, this is the place to be to watch the sun go down… Coming soon!
Field appears
Finally, a bit of a change in the weather: several degrees above freezing and steady on-and-off light rain. Although the air has been cold for the last couple of weeks, the sun has been doing its thing, heating up any patches of open ground and slowly melting the snow away from underneath. So, just a little extra help, and we see ground in no time. This drawn-out melt-off means water is puddling everywhere, freezing and thawing overnights, gradually seeping in. I think this is a good thing: our clayey (clay-loam) soil, with its high water-holding capacity, will be saturated to the max, and hold water longer, well into spring, a good break for the first seeds in. This is my theory… Y’know, there’s an upside to almost everything!