Killing Cold

[greenstorm]

I don't want you to misunderstand me: most cold incidents happen right around freezing, when people get wet and then their clothes no longer function properly. We treat that sort of weather with a little more contempt, and our carelessness costs us.

But.

It's -40 here. That's where the streams cross, where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. It feels perilous in my bones, at least whenever I'm not sitting home next to a really big pile of firewood and my woodstove.

It's not instant frostbite weather unless you're wet, and it's relatively hard to get wet at this temperature. I can go outside and do chores with single-layer work gloves and get cold fingers and my cheeks burn, but it doesn't damage me.

It's a little that nothing *works* in this weather. Batteries fail, so vehicles and flashlights and phones don't have juice to start or run. Tucker's little car won't start, and my 4runner with a brand new battery takes a bit. More concerning, my brakes don't really work; I get the feeling my brake fluid is, well, not super fluid in there and I really have to mash the pedal to have an effect. Normally my lights turn off when I use the fob to lock my doors, but they don't in the cold.

It's a little that the inside walls of my house get real cold and the inside of my windows and dog door ice over. The humidity drops below 10% (which is the tolerance of my equipment) because any humidity freezes immediately to the windows.

If you're dressed right and your car breaks down in cell signal (there isn't a ton of cell signal up here) you'll be fine. If you're in an accident, your car stops heating, and you are upside down or stuck in your car and can't think quickly to get help? You're dead.

Waterlines become an issue. My outside tap freezes around -25 or so.

Muscovies start to get frostbite on their feet around -25 too. If I don't manage them very well and carefully I have to cull.

The ground sounds like Styrofoam. Ice becomes like very solid rock, not really breakable or stompable anymore.

The laws of physics just seem different, and my body instinctively feels afraid. These are the days I don't think humans belong in outer space, it's just too cold. Maybe we don't even belong this far north.

A week of this, then it warms up, and maybe a couple more weeks of it this winter. Wish me luck.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

wild. my chickens won't even walk out into the snow, let alone eat it. of course, they've never had to deal with snow for more than a day, and they've always had fresh water ready to hand because it doesn't get that cold here. i have diva chickens! or do you have hens? if your birds are all waterfowl, it makes sense that they would be unfazed by snow.

fire is definitely the most frightening threat to our area. drought is a very real consideration as well, just less immanently terrifying. we are thrifty with water, use water-conservation methods for irrigation (drip systems, mostly, some rainwater harvesting particularly in the barnyard - the hens love their rainwater, and we just set up rainwater harvesting for the goats) - and we pay a lot of attention to cleaning the leaves and other tree-debris off the house roofs, and maintaining a fire-defense perimeter (15-20' of no flammable things, as best as possible) around the houses.

we want to set up a high-tunnel greenhouse too - to hold moisture in, rather than to protect from snow! it would extend our growing season basically through the whole winter, too. useful things, high-tunnels. our current growing season is early March through mid-November, give or take. one year we put out our spring crops in February, it got so warm so fast. though then it stalled out in March. another year we were still harvesting tomatoes in late November, which was weird. we wouldn't be able to do year-round tomatoes, but we could have greens all year, and roots like beets and carrots and garlic and onions, and probably have more success with brassicas (which are HARD omg i have never successfully grown broccoli in my life) and celery and so on.

our biggest weed species are tumbleweed (naturally, all three primary species of it but mostly russian thistle), koschia, goatheads (i really hope you don't have those: tribulus terrestris), bermuda grass, pigweed (also called lambsquarter), bindweed (aka wild morning glory), and a tall leggy mustard sometimes called tumblemustard. we get others, but those are the big ones. there's a native plantain that reseeded itself from some horse manure that i actually like a lot that comes up as a weed. now and then we get a dandelion; we usually let those live as they are both medicine and food. grass is the one we battle constantly.

[greenstorm]

My chickens are specifically extra-hardy breeds (chanteclers, and ameraucanas with a touch of australorp in the barnyard ones) so they should have snow in their genes. My co-worker says she used to have chickens that ate snow, but her current ones hate it.

I'm coming around on chickens up here. They do need a draft-free area, but they're not nearly so messy with their water. Some breeds (I'm looking at youm light sussex) don't seem to be able to handle the cold, but others seem to be good.

Fire is scary here too, but it tends to have good seasons and bad seasons. I was evacuated in 2018 for fires, with all my animals, and I definitely have PTSD triggers around it. Luckily it rained all year here this summer and I'm healing a little. If we get fires though, they tend to be huge landscape-level ones so in some ways what I do right around the house won't help much -- at least until I replace the shingle roof with metal. Then I'll be pretty safe (it's an A-frame, so once the roof is metal there's not much left for embers to settle on).

I'm also blessed with dense clay. There are folks down the way who lose established fruit trees if they don't water for a week in their sand. Once I've got organics in my ground I'm going to be pretty confident with barely watering in summer with the way the clay retains water, and my well is very good.

I'm so envious of your long seasons! Back on the coast we could theoretically grow, or at least hold, all year round. Pretty much it was the same as you describe, no hot-weather plants but frost tolerant things could make it through and be harvested, except they always degenerated into a mass of mud and slugs. Up here it's just whatever you can keep in cold storage, which is admittedly a lot if you don't happen to have a building collapsed into your root cellar.

The tunnel is an air humidity booster in your case? Broccoli likes such smooth, cool, evenly damp conditions, I can imagine it's difficult there. Do you have more success with the sprouting/nonheading ones?

We share a couple of your weeds - I make sure to let lamb's quarters go to seed every year because it's ultra delicious - but tumbleweeds sound terribly exotic. We get crabgrass (same as Bermuda grass?) but my animals really handle that well in the between-seasons, I've seen bindweed in more established gardens, and we do get plantain and the like. My garden is new enough that, where I'm not still pulling out grasses, it has no perennial weeds that cause many issues. The fact that my geese keep the grass surrounding the garden so short really helps prevent it seeding or running into the garden, although I do get a bunch of oat and barley volunteers on the straw. There are a couple annoying vetches and such.

We're blessedly safe from those goatheads, but we have foxtails in some places (a kind of grass with burrowing barbs). Interestingly, I have chives making inroads into one of my pastures; they seem fine until I think about possibly getting a milking animal who grazes there.

So neat to hear about your environment!

[yarrowkat]

dense clay as a water-holding blessing: a lovely reframe from our usual frustration with our own dense clay!

i haven't tried non-heading broccoli; maybe i should. as a fall crop. we keep meaning to make a shade bed somewhere completely out of direct sun, like the north side of the house, and then put things like broccoli in it. my farmer friend Chris has this high-tunnel, though, in which he grows not only broccoli and cabbage but *celery.* i have intense vegetable envy. there is nothing like fresh celery. it's basically why i want a high-tunnel, even a small one (which is likely all we could manage).

we do put lamb's quarters in our microgreens mix in the spring! before it gets big. i have a love/hate relationship with it; it gets 8' tall and puts on a ginormous root ball that crowds out its neighbors. but it's food. unlike the koschia - which does both of those and is not food, though it's good for livestock at least.

i associate vetch with woodland environments, the mountains. :) like maidenhair fern, which i have in a pot on my office desk but have only seen in the wild on creekbanks in the high country.

i am grateful we do not have slugs. there are snails in the field, but not very many, and the chickens keep them under control. i feed stragglers to the turtle.

[greenstorm]

I've always gardened in clay and I'm very attached to it. It requires a light touch and generous organic matter, it's temperamental in when it's worked, but it can just be so much richer than sand! And I always imagine it as an underground reservoir.

Fresh celery is lovely! As is my wont, I'm a little lazy and replace it with the perennial lovage which takes zero work and freezes nicely. Same flavour, no nice crisp stalks though!

I'm guessing it's more important to pull weeds young there because of water competition? I tend to pull when they pop up above the crop and before they go to seed, then worry about no seed for next year. It only really gets three or four feet high here.

We had maidenhair fern growing outside on the coast up here! It is so beautifully delicate, I didn't know it had such a huge range. Vetch is our annoying twining weed here.

What was the quote, "you don't have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency"? But my ducks trash my garden beds so they're strictly between-season control.

[yarrowkat]

so much organic matter. we add manure of some sort every year, and oodles of compost, and a lot of cottonwood leaves because they are there. our aforementioned friend Chris is coming over with a tractor this weekend to re-till for us, and will mix in a truckload of llama manure at the same time. i suppose i have seen the alternative not as sand, but as loam. deserts don't do loam, though. still, we have built very good soil out of our clay. every new gardenbed is backbreaking effort to start, though.

i don't have any ducks, but i also don't think i have a duck deficiency, lol. as you say, they damage gardens. we did take those random ducks last year for a few weeks and they are in the freezer. our friend Cedar, who always goes in with us on our poultry order, wants ducks this year. but he will raise them. probably either in tractors, or on the other side of his garden fence.

[greenstorm]

Last weekend! I won't even see the ground for months. I'm having tilling envy for all those scents. Cottonwood is one of my favourite tree scents, honestly.

I understand that loam exists, and I've done some soil sampling in many places using the soil texture triangle and even diagnosed it once in awhile, but I've still never found a soil that's both viscerally appealing and low in organics. I hear you on the new bed effort, though. Between my ploughing pigs, grass-eliminating geese, and our climate (snow protection for six months, then freeze/thaw which breaks up compacted soil (and also heaves foundations out of the ground, nothing is perfect)) it's not too bad here but I sure can't make the decision to add a bed in the middle of summer when soil's dried out.

I find ducks easier to manage than chickens since the chickens will fly over my garden fence if they're really feeling it. The duck husbandry book I'm reading right now recommends 4-6 ducks per acre for bug control and I bet at that density they'd leave everything except young lettuces alone. But animals really are my thing up here, and so integral to my one-person low-input system. They are certainly delicious.

[yarrowkat]

i understand intellectually that the earth can freeze. on extremely rare occasions, i've seen it happen - when we went to dig the foundation for our new patio last month, we had to sort of pry up a giant sheet of the top 3" of earth and lay it aside because it was actually frozen. and it stayed that way. remarkable. it's a spot on the north side of the house that literally never sees the sun. the frost-heave is not a thing i have experienced, tho of course i have read Robert Frost. "something there is that does not love a wall," and so on. that makes sense that it would break up the compaction! no natural process does that here. though alfalfa will.

i am always laughing at seed packets for saying things like "plant in full sun as soon as soil can be worked." not here! you can always work the soil (provided it gets a little sun), but that doesn't make it always a good time to plant, and so many things just wither and die in full sun and require some summer shade. we did get the garden tilled Sunday, with the idea that we'll reshape the beds over the next month and have spring crops in by late Feb.

i understand loam to be mostly made of organics; maybe i am using the word wrong. places like North Carolina in the forest, you can sink your hand to the wrist into the soil and absolutely anything will grow with no effort. that kind of dirt.

chickens will definitely do that, and there's always that one hen. that can't be kept out by a fence. one in every batch. our friend Cedar is going to raise some ducks this year (we're ordering the babies for him in our group poultry order) so we'll see how that goes - we do all like to eat duck! maybe two or three of them would be a positive addition.

when Chris was over for the tilling i asked if he thought it would help with the bermuda grass and he said, "oh no. it'll benefit it." HA. one bed at a time i am going to try to move us to no-till or low-till methods. i have the west beds under the apricot trees to start with and have already sheet-mulched them.

i am more a plants person than an animals person overall tho i do love my goats!

[greenstorm]

You know what's really wild? The 43 mile lake the town's built on freezes hard enough to drive on every winter. All that open water, just... freezes. I'm definitely still getting used to it.

How easy is it to get rid of alfalfa once it's broken up the soil? I'm contemplating tillage radish to help the frost along.

Soil scientists around here (I have a professional background, so that's where I default) use something called the soil triangle ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/USDA-Soil-Texture-Triangle_fig2_279631053 ), which defines soils by the percentage of mineral particle sizes. It's a little misleading because clay has many properties, not because of its particle size (which is very small) but from its enormous surface area which comes from being shaped like a dictionary or phone book. That's how it holds on to so many nutrients and so much water. So you sort of use organic matter to prop apart the pages of the book so air etc can get in.

Ahem. But back to the soil triangle. Loam to me is a mix of sand, clay, and silt (medium particles) where it demonstrates properties but not extremes of all them.

Gardener's loam, yes, in that context it would be soil that's aerated and have lots of organic matter. That use feels imprecise to me though, because it doesn't describe the limits of the soil-- what will happen if it's hurt, and how not to hurt it. Sinking one's hand into soil like that, what a lovely image.

I adore sheet-mulching. The number of yards in Vancouver I turned into gardens with a load of cardboard and a load of soil... How deep do you need it to suppress the grass there?

I'd heard a rule of thumb: tilling propagates perennials and kills annuals. Seems legitimate, although I know sometimes tilling exposes weed seeds to the light they need to sprout.

I was always a plants person. This is all surprising to me! I think about rolling it back and spending my feed money on nice compost and greenhouses instead, but the landscape would feel empty.

[yarrowkat]

how easy is it to get rid of alfalfa - it's not, particularly. it breaks up clay by putting down a substantial taproot, up to 6' long and quite sturdy. it'll come back up as a hardy perennial (here) for years. this climate is practically ideal for it though, and it is grown commercially quite extensively in this area, ymmv.

i can see clay being the dictionary of soil, containing words in many languages. :)

i have never used sheet mulching to suppress grass until just this year. i'm using advice from a local gardening group, and we put down a heavy layer of cardboard, then 6" of cottonwood leaf mulch, then 6" of finished compost. if that feels inadequate for planting by the time we start planting, we'll add more soil to the top.

[greenstorm]

Alfalfa grows here too, what an amazing plant. I only recently learned there are perennial and annual versions (?) because I know it can be perennial here, but some seed catalogues listed it as annual.

Or perhaps clay is the library, hoarding what's given to it and releasing it temporarily for a plant's use before it returns to those tight-grabbing leaves.

Report back! I've done cardboard & 1' compost (when fluffy, the compost sank down over time) and it seemed to take care of everything except blackberries on the coast. Sometimes after two years the heartier grass popped back up, I suppose if the rhizomes weren't cut at the edges and continued to feed on up. I think I could get away with 4" in most places here, but I'd want to put blood (nitrogen) on the cardboard to help it break down.

Hm, a pig killing and bed-building seems like a good time honestly.

[yarrowkat]

soil is totally a library. i like that.

i will let you know how the grass-suppression goes! we extended one bed into the path to kill the edge-grass there.

pig-killing and bed-building sounds beautifully intertwined; regenerative ag at it's finest!