It’s going to freeze tonight. Those of you who know what we’ve been doing, planting flowers and shrubs and the like, we are just floored. We got a huge tub and put the water hyacinth in it. We hauled in all the plants that aren’t in the ground. Another major weather wave with high wind and moisture (it’s going to snow a few hundred feet uphill from us) with what they are calling a real toad-strangler out about 100 miles from us and coming this way.
Jane’s back is still too iffy to lift stuff, so I hauled the stuff. It’s chipotle-bean-burgers tonight. I am absolutely NOT cooking, not with Armageddon looming. We’ve lost power twice today. We were china-blue skies for a while, but now it is getting ominously dark gray. We have azaleas, rhodies, they can take it; peonies aren’t quite out yet, but iris are trying to bloom and getting beaten up, and the clematis and sweet peas are not going to like this at all.
Bleh! Feh! Here comes the wind. The koi are really upset I stole their water hyacinth. But it’ll be alive tomorrow. I’m not sure about other things.
Oh geeez … do what we did. Hole up with a stiff drink, or two, or three …
This is the inevitable late-spring monsoon/blizzard. In Ohio, they usually hit the first half of April. Since you are further north, I expect your last winter storm gets delayed a couple of weeks. At least when this is done, you should be fully into spring and looking forward to summer.
Tale the storm as an invitation to kick back for a day or two. Considering that you both have been overextending yourselves (poor Jane!) an enforced period of rest, maybe with hot cocoa, couldn’t hurt. If you have a back lanai, setting up a hibachi or grill back there in case of power outage might give you options.
–>This<—
You two must absolutely take this advice, hot cocoa and all.
One day … I so hope to change my icon. Really, that looks NOTHING like me!
I think Captain Kirk walked everybody through the icon process back when—and we sort of tried to paraphrase on the left sidebar; but we probably ought to review it. Because I get my own admin icon by a different process, I can’t help you, but if someone would give us some help, we’ll try to publicize the method.
I don’t recall the details now; it was when I first discovered the blog. I’ve just tried searching for my post about avatars, but I don’t get any hits from 2009. CJ, if you can search by username, look for my first couple of postings…
Egads! The weather has been “surprising” in Washington lately. I live in Forks and it got kicked hard yesterday. Sounds like you two got the worst of it too. And there was so little warning!!
I feel very bad for anyone who was camping in the Forks area this week — we have tons of “Twilight Fans” in the area, and they love to camp. I would not have wanted to be camping under trees in that wind storm. Gah.
Hope everything survives over there! You two have worked so very hard on your yard!
Cover what you can in plastic sheeting (including old shower curtains), unless the wind is going to howl so much that you know it will never be properly weighed down.
We’re real warm here right now in Boston but I haven’t yet dared to put out/plant any real tender stuff yet. My mom is gambling with her garden in NH, though.
If the prediction is only a couple of degrees below freezing (which it is according to my wunderground site) and you are in the middle of a built-up neighborhood, you will probably squeak by without actually freezing; at least I regularly do. And the hyacinths in the thermal mass of the water would probably have survived, but I’m sure the tops will look much better for your having lugged them in. Ground is much warmer than air, so even a bedsheet over something tender will help.
This is what I live with for weeks in the fall as I procrastinate about getting all the houseplants in.
That is one of the most annoying things about gardening. The nice weather fools you into
a massive planting and the cursed freeze hits. It is probably the only good reason for
delaying plantings, but as soon as it warms up the itch to plant takes over. It’s probably
the curse of the Surtr.
It helps to know your micro climate but it takes years to figure it out, ours is very
unforgiving about freezing weather because of the associated wind and vortex in the yard.
Off topic. I see Venter has succeeded in building an artificial lifeform. The implications
in the long run are fairly staggering. I don’t think the processor speed is high enough
to do human fault correction in vitro and then implant but it is just technology now.
Given the accelerated pace of this science branch it’s not safe to time frame anything.
More like, as I read the news article this morning, Venter has inserted arteficial DNA into an existing lifeform, which agreed to replicate along the new DNA lines… still a huge accomplishment but also drawing a lot of cell processes from existing life.
More off topic stuff…GRIN
Apparently the Herodotus story about the Persian army dying in a massive
sandstorm in 525 BC wasn’t a fairy tale. They are digging them up. This
is like the Amazon grave. Another reason to distrust academics who think
they have an absolute lock on human knowledge.
CJ-ji, I do hope all your plants survived cold. We had much the same problem last week. (I thought weather patterns flowed west to east! 😉 ) Spring has sprung back, but I’m *really* glad I held off putting my dahlias and cannas out.
@tyr, do you know of any sites for the Herodotus story?
Re Herodotus: interesting!
Well, we paid attention to the latest-freeze-on-record for Spokane (May 5) and gave it one more week for safety. And *still* got caught! But thank goodness we seem to have gotten through the night with heavy frost on the roofs and on any mounded ground, but no apparent damage to the plants. I’m glad we brought the water hyacinth in, all the same, and my new bamboo shoots. Jane covered her morning glory and moonflower seedlings.
What we have on our side, besides, is a 6′ flat-board stockade fence, a garage wall, a lot of rock (acts as a heat-dispenser at night) and 4000 gallons of warm water in the midst of it all. That protected us, plus the wind stayed fairly easy, compared to the storm blasts of yesterday.
Forks in a windstorm could be really scary—we have those four 50′ trees beside the house, but they’re pretty well anchored. Plus the river channels and the cliffs help guide and break up some of the strongest winds that come our way. Not to mention our trees have sunk their roots deep in glacial moraine, so they are involved with lots of rock—so far the worst we’ve gotten is a weeping split in one big trunk, but it seems to be healing, at least as trees do, growing over its injury. It’ll never be as strong as the other 3, but again, it’s got the support of a brother-tree.
And I suppose now they’ll have revised the freeze records for Spokane: instead of May 5th as the safe date on which to put in your plants, they’ll have May 20th. Tonight it’s supposed to be 38 at night; then 35 (I’m keeping an eye on that one) and then back into the 40’s at night. Note that the May 19th freeze was preceded by 80 degree days. When the door into Alaska opens, we get one heckuva draft, and the jet stream, as Tulrose points out, was probably what did it to us. It darned near looped, it was folded so tight, right over us.
This chap out on the high flats lost a barn: they’re calling it an F1 tornado, but I’m dubious for an odd reason. He raises rodeo stock, and has horses. Just before this hit, he came out to the fence to check on things, and the horses all came out of the barn in the theory they’d be fed—which saved the horses as the barn went flying off. They were unhurt: the barn looks like a crumpled tent lying some distance away.
This is not the manner of horses or cattle with a tornado bearing down. They tend to spook and move and food is not what they’re thinking. I’m thinking maybe 80 mph straight-line-wind, which could easily lift up a big open barn like a parasail if it came at the right angle (it was more a loafing shed with sides than it was a barn: don’t think big red barn.)
So here we are in Washington, and they’ve got news crews out with the big truck surveying one little collapsed shed that didn’t look too sturdy in the first place: you know you’re not in Oklahoma when…
More serious was the chap sleeping in his bed when a 60′-70′ Ponderosa Pine with a trunk diameter it would take two people to embrace crashed down onto his roof, his wall, his bed—his wife was visiting relatives and he was sleeping on her side of the bed or it would have landed on him. The whole bedroom area of his house, and his roof, are going to have to be rebuilt, and of course a huge tree extracted from about waist-high in the room, with an unplanned skylight. THAT is typical Washington major storm damage.
OUCH!
CJ, briefly, consider going to Costco for on of those big cage fans.
I remember when orange groves ruled Southern California, and some people were mystified that the growers would set up fans during frost threats. Thing is, all the power going into the fan comes out as warmth: conservation of energy. The cooling is from helping perspiration cool out bodies better due to more air passing by, even if it’s warmer. Heat is movement (friction, for instance), and a fan produces movement.
Once freeze-time passes, the big fans are great for cooling. I don’t run the A/C but a few days a year–more humid days that hot days–I blow the hot air out of the house at night (fan blowing *out* the window, and seal the cool night air in, in the morning. I have my fan blowing out my study window and have my bedroom window open as the inlet, getting the coolest air possible. Your mileage may vary depending on humidity.
Those orchard fans were – are, maybe, still – the size of small airplane propellers. I think they worked mostly by keeping the air moving. The heat was smudge pots – small burners, basically, that put out heat (and smoke), and could be set throughout an orchard.
I remember my father putting a small tarp over a young citrus tree, with a kerosene lamp underneath, turned way down. Once the tree was established and had grown a bit, he didn’t bother any more. The tree is still there, I think (it’s a mandarin, and they’re fairly hardy).
I have long maintained that I prefer New England. Some flooding if you live on lowish ground; some hurricanes but normally not much (and are smart emough not to live right on the beach) and lots of snow if you are lucky. In Vermont (and Montreal), where part of my family is, it’s just snow that is the worry. And they know how to handle it.
There’s a house out at Inola, OK, where the roof lifted off, the curtains blew out, and the roof settled back on with the curtains trapped between the roof and the walls. It’s half-way down this article.
http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?S=12480153
We discussed this at my monthly retiree breakfast this week and came to the conclusion that roofs are supposed to be attached to walls and someone, somewhen had built that house without any reference to the codes. Inola is out in the country which sort-of explains it.
I saw this happen in the Camelot tornado in OKC: this one skimmed my roof and tried to burst my eardrums, but I was about a mile away from the serious damage. I don’t approve of rubbernecking in disaster areas, but as a semi-local resident I did take a drive-through to find out what had happened to colleagues and students of mine; and one nice house (a colleague’s) was missing its roof and had its entire contents lifted out and distributed about the neighborhood. But the most bizarre site was a house that had its whole roof lifted, and these bright sea-blue drapes flipped out, and then the roof re-settled. That was sure to be an interesting fix. I’m sure they had to demolish that roof to nail the roof timbers to the wall frame. And if it were my house, they’d have put some hurricane straps on those timbers while they were at it.
It’s just plain nuts everywhere this year. I live in the mountains in Arizona, about 5000 ft elevation. Three weeks ago we got snow — two days before we took off on a long vacation to Vancouver BC and then an Alaska Cruise — where we had a couple of days of on-again-off-again drizzle in Vancouver, then clear and fabulous weather in Alaska, nice and clear in the 50s with no precip AND perfectly clear lovely day in Seattle to fly home from! It was nearly 100 yesterday and today in Phoenix, 90 miles to the southwest and tomorrow night it’s supposed to be 36 degrees here. This is not typical at all! Sure hope all your new young plants in the various gardens weather this bit of weirdness, and the koi too! Hopefully this is over quick and back to more temperate weather for you.
We see this type of weather in El Nino years quite frequently in Southern California. Some of our fruit trees were blooming and then we get hit with colder temps and it remains to be seen if the fruit will survive. Since I hail from Puget Sound, i tend to like the weather a little cooler than our normal weather this time of year, but not so cold it damages the fruit and veggies. I hope the koi and plants fare well.
Welcome in!
Yep, we survived it—we have a pond of warm water closely surrounded by 6′ fence, and I think that helps. The back yard is 10 degrees cooler than the ambient in the front yard in summer, and it’s possible we get that back in reverse during cold weather, at least once the ground temperature warms up. I’ve not measured the air out there compared to the front yard during a cold snap, but we were lucky!
Have you all seen the video of the Oklahoma hail storm and the pool? It is a very graphic example of why you want to be inside during a hailstorm. It starts off a little slow, but really picks up around 1:30 into the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFv2W7Duqiw
That’s incredible. When we got hit in Edmond, OK, we had major damage from only 5-10 of those big ones per yard. The town looked as if it had been shelled, with holes in the roof.
It looks like even the fish aren’t safe in a hailstorm.