Stupid, Stupid Wind

… flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress … 

~Shakespeare, Poem XIII


Hmm … where's the rest of the cold frame? There should be three more glass panes on that one, and now the baby mache is all exposed to temperatures in the teens (and, today, some snow). If you look carefully, you can see some bits of white in the quadrant behind the cold frames. Let's walk back there and take a closer look:


Well, crap. I don't know what the biggest problem is: the likely ruination of that cold frame's mache crop, the definite destruction of the glass panes, or the suckiness that will be the clean up of all those bits of glass out of the gravel paths. Oh, and out of the leaf mulch over the garlic bed in the spring:


Now, that must have been some wind. Why is it so windy here? This is the fourth or fifth time since we've lived here that we woke up to backyard destruction after a windy night … and that's not including power outages.  

As Kirk pointed out, there are a few bright-ish sides. First, we'll get to see just how hardy a green the mache really is, since now it's fully exposed to the winter weather. We do have a few extra windows in the garage (somewhere), so we may be able to cover it back up — although it's probably not worth the trouble of excavating the garage to find them when there isn't much planted in that cold frame anyway. Also, those cold frames were technically too small for the beds in this garden (they were originally built for the the garden at the Red House), so now we have incentive to make new ones for next fall. And I guess it's pretty clear that we will be working on designing an incredibly sturdy and wind-resistant cold frame/tunnel system— we might be looking at a framed greenhouse (collapsible, though). So that will be fun to figure out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more