Greetings from the farm! How are we doing? It’s cold.
The dog’s water bowl had a thin layer of ice on it in the house this morning, so I guess it’s around 32 degrees in here. The space heater in the bedroom is thankfully keeping it about 15 degrees warmer in there, but I have ventured out to post this blog with a winter weather update. It never dried out enough for the city to put our gasline in, so we are (obviously) still without heat.
But things in the house are less important to us than things in the field, and it’s even colder out there. It got down to 21 last night, made worse by the fact that it was cold all day yesterday, and the duration of the low temperatures is equally important as the temps themselves. It’s not supposed to break freezing until almost noon today, which wont give things much time to thaw out before another night in the twenties.
Friday we battened down the hatches – covering almost everything in the field with one, two, or three layers of frost cloth. All the seed trays were wisked out of the cold frame and back into the greenhouse, covered with frost cloth and another layer of plastic. My mistake was in putting them on the tables – the flats on the ground appear to have fared better.
It is still too early to tell what made it and what didn’t, and form a contingency plan based on the damage. We will continue to hunker down in the bedroom with hot tea and read to each other about hot peppers from the Baker Creek seed catalogue in an effort to stay warm, and worry about our plants. All I can say is Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) was right, spring is certainly not here yet.
