Thứ Sáu, 3 tháng 1, 2014

Lest we forget what cold weather actually feels like…

Magnolia Rose Marie

I ran across some photos from this past season in an odd place on my computer… I really don't know if these particular ones were posted before (probably were) but since they are a nice reflection on last season, I'll use them again.

Magnolia Rose Marie
Now… regarding the weather. It is cold and about to get colder here in Wisconsin. In particular, we are forecast daytime highs of -10 degrees early this next week. Lows may be -20 or colder. I've often said that my attempts to grow less hardy plants may eventually be put to the test! On the other hand, it could be quite revealing as to what survives. On the positive side, we still have a pretty decent snow cover although there was considerable thawing the Saturday after Christmas with a low that was above the freezing point over night. The biggest factor for survival is that the garden was hardened off gradually and there have been no big thaws below ground, which could allow sap to flow. Crossing my fingers!


It seems that every old man I've known in my life has stories about how cold it used to be! When I was young in Vermont, it was tales of -40 degrees fahrenheit and snow piled up over the windows. Now that I'm getting to be an old man myself, I have a story along those lines from a time when I was eighteen years old and driving a retail lumber truck in the mountains while on winter break from Boston University. It was literally -30 degrees fahrenheit every day until noon for the entire month of January and the mountain roads were slick in the bright winter sunlight. Every step I took made a crunching sound that was as irritating as finger nails on a chalk board. I was constantly lying on the ground installing chains on my truck so that I could make it up the ice covered mountain roads. In the end I became very ill with double pneumonia, a badly swollen heart, and pulmonary emboli. That cold winter totally changed the direction of my life and I was lucky to live through the experience as I wasn't expected to make it.


A number of years later after my new bride and I first bought this decrepit old cheese factory, the first winter the ancient furnace ran non-stop for days at a time and the building never got above 55 degrees. The local farmers helped me spread paper feed sacks along the north side of the foundation and we hauled in fresh manure onto the sacks which helped heat the foundation and kept the icy wind out. It worked although the clean-up come spring was a bit of a task! I particularly recall he north wind blowing steadily through the edges of the rotted windows. It wasn't long before I started the renovation projects that would eventually make the place livable. I have to laugh when I watch young couples on shows like "House Hunters" exclaiming that there is no way they could live with that '90's kitchen in the house they are viewing at the moment!

Magnolia Yellow Bird

In recent years, the coldest I can recall is a couple nights of -23 degrees… a whole lot warmer than those early years here at Oak Lawn that often reached a minus 30 degrees overnight. I'm hoping that this approaching cold will be short-lived, but there isn't much that's to be done about it other than to learn from it regarding plant choices in the future.
Stay warm! Larry

p.s.  Back to reality!!



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