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]

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!