it snowed her last night...not nearly as much as the forecast said was possible...nothing new in that...this should help a bit since the palmer drought indices still had my home county in a long term "abnormally dry" climate regime ( which is the best it has been in most of the last year )...temperatures over the next few days are forecast to be in the upper thirties and low forties so the snow won't be here long...it has been cold enough up to this to re-freeze the ground so i don't know how much of the melt will actually reach the water table and how much is going to end up as runoff...even if the drought indices are placated the trees may not be...the cover crop in the field by the supermarket hasn't found any sort of dormancy...either in the photo i took yesterday or today's portrait of plants obscured by snow...neither has the wheat grass from kansas on campus...some of that in my back yard has...some hasn't...harsher climate a few miles east? or just soil structure and content? what is thriving is the asparagus...up to twenty plants in various stages of development...one of the earliest to emerge has prospered under the grow light in the cool of the basement here at the garden's temporary headquarters and has produced a second spear to feed the growing root system...this plant could be seriously pot bound by the middle of april and may have to be hardened off and planted next month ( i will be out in the iu northwest community garden in march anyway, preparing the bed with compost for the asparagus and putting in some northern tepehuan teosinte....which needs a cycle of cold to break dormancy...that i want to use to compliment the hopi blue maize i have earmarked for the center of the aparagus bed )...that would leave it at risk of frost ( unless we have a repeat of last march's weather )but they are cold hardy ( how else could they germinate in the temperatures in this old house ) and i may be concerned for nothing...still if it were as established as the plants in the pgp i would be much less concerned...i am chafing to be back out in the garden and doing something in the soil beyond seed starting...as the weather warms a bit i will be clearing out the new potato patch in my back yard ( about a month and a half to planting reds! ) and checking up on the ramps ( due to be up in march if they germinate successfully...they need both cycles of heat and cold to break dormancy..if i remember correctly i planted them in august so i hope they come up...however they can take two years to appear so i will limit my disappointment if they fail to emerge ) and the ginseng that i planted in september...enough of planning and seed accumulation ( the research goes on forever )...i need to act...more as it comes up
more snow expected in a few days
ReplyDeletelike the freezing rain and "three to five inches with snowfalls of up to one inch an hour" predicted as possible in the last panic-mongering "winter weather advisory issued by the national weather service" i will believe it when i see it. my late ( and missed ) uncle evan was a meteorologist who always advised me that if i wanted to know what the weather was going to be to invest in a good barometer and look out the window...he has proved correct in his skepticism of his vocation time and again.
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