Outdoors: waiting! Today was a cold, dark, wet, oppressively gray day, and then, at the last minute, the sky cleared for a beautiful coppery-golden sunset. I headed outside to check out the light, and for the first time this season, caught that delicious summertime sun-comes-out-after-the-rain feeling. It’s especially sweet when you’re growing stuff because it means: A) it’s sunny again, and B) you got rain! Simple pleasures. What could be finer (with the Weather)? In the photo, the end of the moldboarded section of the south field—it’s all gently thawing out…
melt-off
The great WARM outdoors!
Ahhh, yes, THIS is what warm weather feels like! For the first time this year, the temperature topped 60°F (15°C), with a hazy sun and a gentle breeze. We’ve had some melt-off days already, but this one tastes like spring! Usually, there’s a day like this sometime in February, so it’s been a long time coming, and makes me wonder how even crazier the rest of the weather will be. No worries…today feels great.
The photo is a good to-do list for when real spring comes and the ground is dry enough to work and get around on. There’s a jumble of spare lumber taken from the barn when we cleared an area for the new seedling room—it needs to be sorted and stacked, and some of it will be the new chickenhouse! (Only patches of snow are left on much of the land, but I’m sure it’ll be back before it’s really gone.) The abundantly overgrown grasses that partially surround the barn and border the moldboarded garden areas is a big clean-up job. And, up the slope, the Kubota compact tractor calmly waits for after the hired-big-tractor disking and the compost spreading, when we do the final tilling of the garden beds. Coming soon. Cool!
South slope waiting
The promising south-facing slope is there, plowed and waiting! After the last melt-off, we quickly went back to freezing temperatures day and night, and more wall-to-wall snow cover. A couple of days ago, a bit of chilly rain cleared things up quite a bit once again. Today, it’s frigid!
Mid-February melt-off
It rained steadily, on and off, all day yesterday, through the night and still today, with the temperature a couple of degrees above zero. In other words, cold, gray, wet, miserable, and also perfect for removing vast quantities of snow. The 2-3′ of coverage in the field is gone. It’s still cold, though, and back to sub-zero tomorrow, so no giant warm blast of spring just yet, only an easy way to the greenhouse to clean stuff out. Great timing!
A little winter rain…
Just when all the cold was getting a bit monotonous, we get some crazy weather changes to keep things interesting. By late morning, the packed snow on paths had turned to ice and puddles. Today was the first of two days forecast to be “unseasonaby warm,” with rain and 50°F+ (10°C+) daytime temperatures. By tomorrow, most of the snow will be gone… The day after, it’s back to double-digit subzero and…more snow! Meanwhile, this morning I was happily sliding around outside in a T-shirt and shirt…!
Change of view
Last month, this month, the seasons march on. It looks farily snowbound, but this could all melt off in a single unseasonably warm day. Like last winter. (Browse through last January if you’ve forgotten the completely odd DOUBLE melt-off we had back then…). There’s never a dull moment with our thoroughly modern weather!
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!