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!
rain
More weather
This February, tiny farming for me is mostly about, inside, watching seedlings in a growing number of plug sheets under lights, and outside, watching the weather. In this zone, Feb is a little early for thinking about garden conditions. Well, “normally”, it would be. Now, given the increasingly erratic winter, I’m trying to figure out a new early season production strategy. Conceivably, end of March could be shockingly warm and the ground dry enough to work, and instead of just seeding early peas, I could try some super early field transplants. But then, what if winter happened to come back, not for a day or two of April snow, as sometimes happens, but for a week or two, with freezing temperatures. Early plantings could get killed off, and then I’d need a second set of seedlings! This is how I’m kinda starting to think, about trying to plant around the weather, take advantage of unpredictably good conditions, while expecting some weird bad turns as well. What do last and first average frost dates really mean, given the last five years? Is a 30-year local rainfall average still in any way a useful guideline? Am I…exaggerating? Two days ago, it was 40°F (5°C) and raining right through the night. I was sure the forecast for an even warmer Wednesday would come through to finish off another, fourth big melt-off. Instead, yesterday morning it did a sudden 180, froze up and dumped a ton of snow. Today, there are 7-8′ snowbanks all around the barnyard (from snow plowing). The once and future chickenhouse practically disappeared… ;) Will spring and summer be different from that?!
Riding the weather
If this first half of winter is any indication at all, the upcoming growing season could be a really crazy ride. After the extensive one-day melt-off, just four days ago, followed by an immediate plunge into bitter cold, the snow came back just as quickly with a one-day storm yesterday and through part of last night. I deliberately don’t watch much news anymore, but I did catch the weather report of this massive, North America-wide blizzard and/or ice storm, depending on where in its path you happened to be. (At the same time, I saw reports of weird heavy snow stranding millions in China, and freakish winter tornadoes somewhere else.) Well, here we didn’t get that heavy a blast, maybe six or eight inches, but enough to instantly restore classic winter conditions. The photo below is snow plowed aside in the barnyard this morning, the rail fence peeking out from behind is 5′ (1.5m) high. Now, it looks like 50°F (10°C) and rain for at least a day or two mid-week. If that happens, IT’LL ALL BE GONE AGAIN! This is the THIRD major full-snow-no-snow cycle so far this winter, and it looks like more to come. I know this extreme weather is a global thing, we’re ALL feeling something wild, but I figure, keeping a daily-or-so journal of what’s going on on THIS tiny farm, I ought to get it down anyway. For the record! :)
Extreme farming…
Yesterday, the temperature decided to climb up to just over 40°F (5°C) and stay there for the day…and well into the night. Around midnight, it began to rain. By the time I peeked out this morning, it was back to bitter cold and frozen ground, but not before most of the snow had melted away. This seems really unusual, even for the weather extremes we’ve been having the last five years. It’s the second meltoff so far where the ground actually thawed out. Bob, who has an old school farmer’s memory of conditions going back a good 40 farming years, says THIS is the single weirdest winter he can recall…and it’s only half through. I’m not shocked. As I often (kinda… cheerfully) say to people, having started into this growing life exactly five seasons ago, crazy weather is all I’ve known! Before that, notable weather events were absolutely discrete, novelty items in my mind, there was no practical reason to connect one to the other and maintain any sort of continuous memory of conditions over the years…like farmers and gardeners do. Now that I do have a short bit of weather memory to work with, what it tells me is that, in the field, you really can’t count on ANYTHING at all, from one month to the next, and even less so from year to year. “Gone completely haywire” comes to mind. Garden accordingly… It really is tiny farming as an extreme sport!
Puddles on ice
Yesterday, it hovered a little above freezing, today, it rocketed up to nearly 50°F (10°C) and started to rain pretty good. There are puddles on paths where the snow was packed and icy (here, the reflection is Bob’s shed), patches of ground showing through in spots, and the overall snow level is dropping. It’s supposed to freeze up again tomorrow, but today’s 15-day weather forecast says there’ll be a string of warm days in early January that would melt things right down. Two winters in one? That’d shake up the trees and everything else living in the field. Wouldn’t be a surprise…!
Rainy day harvest fashion
Jo sports a borrowed rain jacket with snap-on drawstring hood, in striking work yellow—perfect protection for a rainy harvest day. Today was probably the wettest harvest Friday of the year, and it wasn’t bad. A couple of heavy downpours kept us indoors for quite a while (snapping farm fashion shots out of the Milkhouse door…), otherwise, a light drizzle for part of the afternoon hardly slowed us down. For the occasional wet work, Conall favors a full rainsuit, jacket and pants, while I so far make do with a hooded rain jacket—I’ll pop inside and wait out the heavier stuff. Lynn arrived after the major downpours. Today’s four-person crew made good time despite the weather. For the record: mesclun, spicy salad greens (arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, red mustard), collards, kale, spinach, radish, carrots, beets, green onion, summer squash, bok choi, tomato and potato (harvested yesterday), and garlic and onions from storage!!
Drought, what drought?
A week after the last couple of inches, it rained again today, a steady, fairly intense downpour that left about 1.5″ (38mm) in around an hour. It came down quick enough to leave huge puddles in a couple of low-lying sections. Pretty cool, they drained in less than 30 minutes, and it reminded me of what too much of a good thing can look like, as I imagined washed out seeds and floated seedlings in new fall beds if the rain just kept on going. Nothing like farm weather for bringing out the fickleness—extreme adaptability?—in people. It only takes a minute to go from cursing the lack of rain to hoping it’ll stop already. How excellent and effortless growing can be when the weather’s going right… Wouldn’t it be great to just take control of the weather (are they already doing it in China?). Yikes!