More Indoor Projects

 More cold and more snow.  More indoor projects.  My garden fence consists mainly of hog panels.  With a top rail and a bottom rail, this give you a fence that is a little over four feet high.  Deer can easily jump that if they choose, so we added a single wire at about six feet.  

The higher wire is not very visible so my husband suggested I add some sort of flag to it so the deer would see it and sense the fence was higher.  For those of you who have ever kept horses, this is like going around and tying strips of t-shirt material on a wire fence so the horse can see it.  Horses have a pretty active imagination so a mental barrier works well.  Cattle have very little imagination and a lot less mental power, so mental barriers do not work well.  Deer fall somewhere in the middle.  If it seems like too much effort, or looks like a potential trap, they will avoid it unless they are starving.  They have never challenged this fence.  If they did, they would probably hit the top wire  and the wire would likely break.

When we were trying to think up a way to flag this mental barrier, my husband suggested I do something with my vintage seed packets.  The artwork on seed packets is very interesting, and the variety makes them fun to collect.  They can be addictive like baseball cards.  My brain immediately made the jump to vintage seed catalog art which is even more interesting.  I just clip pictures from the internet and print them out then laminate them with our laminator machine and presto, you have a plastic "flag" to hang on the fence.

I keep a selection of catalog covers and old magazine covers and even advertisements and poster art to print out.  The laminate lasts for two or three seasons if you do it right.  Some designs I print out over and over but there are always new ones to try.  And I really enjoy them when they are hanging on the fence.  They are like wall art.  And some of them I walk by dozens of times a day.  I take them down in the fall because the deer show no interest in the gravel filled garden when there is nothing growing in it.  That saves weather induced wear an tear on the laminate so I can get several seasons out of them.

I print out two pictures per page trying to keep the dimension and scale similar because....

I place them back to back so that there is a picture on each side.  I match up pairs with similar widths and trim them to size on a paper cutter.  For the laminate to be secure and water proof the paper you are laminating needs to be smaller than the laminate so it gets a good seal on all four sides.  I place two double sided papers side by side in one lamination sleeve with twice as much space between them than there is on the outer edge so when I cut them apart they will be centered in the laminate.

I run them through the laminator as a pair and cut them apart after they cool.

I leave a top margin of one inch or more because that is what I am going to fold over the wire and staple.  I put three staples in the top of each flag making sure not to staple in the paper area because that will let rain into the paper which will quickly delaminate the flag.

I threw out four flags last fall when I took them down.  I always make a few extra in case one needs to be replaced mid-season.  Now I am looking forward to May when I will put out my flags again signaling the start of garden season.

How Cold is Cold?

On a day when most of America is suffering unusual cold and snow, I thought you all might be curious about our weather.  The snow has stopped, the sun is out, but the tradeoff for clear weather is extreme cold.   This is one of the rare days when we are hunkering down.  With that wind chill factor ~ No morning walk today.  My husband did about a third of his walk and came back in.  I walked Monday morning when it was in the single digits, and when the wind hits you it cuts through any face covering you can come up with and gives you an ice cream headache.  I am going to stay in and finish ordering seeds and seed starting supplies.

The Snow is Melting

 The temperature has warmed up to 32F and the snow is getting heavy and sinking.

This morning the shapes it was slumping into and holding on were fascinating.

You can see the original depth where the snow has clung to the fence wire.

Later the sun came out and the interesting shapes began to fall.

Snowdrifts get into the darndest places.  If this all falls in one chunk it will damage the vent hood and the light.  Its done it before.

It needs to be whittled away in smaller chunks.  

It's sort of like climbing Everest.

ReShoveling

 Seems like we just did this.  There are not many years when we feel we have to shovel.  We have never shoveled twice in one season.  There is more snow up there this time than the first time.  We're getting pretty efficient at this and it only took one hour to clear the house roof.  We remembered to move the step to the deck this time so we could get the tractor bucket closer to the eaves and the roof rake that we purchased for the green temporary building was an excellent tool for the house roof.

Many hands make light work.  No matter what the chore, it is always nice to have someone helping so that when you look around you find that some of the work is already done.  The roof had a very slippery layer of ice on the bottom.  If you straddle the ridge, you can push everything from the far side over the eaves with the long handled roof rake.

Along the top of the ridge the snow was about two feet deep.

If you find good footing you can push snow off the back of the roof into the lawn.

The length of the roof rake handle left about three feet along the eaves.  Instead of standing on the slippery slope you can reach everything from the relative safety of the tractor loader.

All done.  Next week's forecast is for daytime high temperatures in the single digits and more lake effect snow.  Lake Erie is 36% frozen over.  Average for this date is 40%  This is taking for.ever.....

An Ounce of Prevention

 When we got up this morning we discovered that we had over a foot of lake effect snow on the ground.  After plowing and breakfast we went back out to find another six inches on top of that.

This is exactly what they mean when they say "a marshmallow world".

This snow fell on top of over a foot of snow that had compacted on everything.

Potting Bench

It's always interesting to go out and see how the snow is distributed,

Strawberry Cages

The tall pub chairs and patio boxes are almost completely buried,

The bunkers full of mulch and gravel look like a ski slope.

We have to get out and move some snow before it gets any deeper.  You never know when you might need to get to the trailer.

I shoveled out the trailer just for a reset.

We had to plow the old snow from where the trailer was sitting before we could clean more snow off of the building.

Pull all of the snow off of the tarps and then plow again.  The roof is reinforced, but we don't want anything tearing.

We try to keep all of the driveways clear and all of the buildings accessible.  You still have to get to things like the tractor fuel.  This may only be two feet or so, but when we get another two feet on top of this we will wish we'd started sooner.

We started shoveling the flat roofs.

I shoveled the deck because tomorrow we plan to get up on the house roof again and we will need a place to throw snow... and put up a ladder.

The front porch is also very flat.

We had missed our morning walk because the road was slippery, but two and a half hours of shoveling burns calories too.

Tomorrow we shovel the other side of the roof. That is the part of the house we worry most about.  It is 1950s construction.  Compared to the older part of the house it is less equipped to deal with the weight of the snow.  Instead of 13 feet wide it is 26 feet wide.  Instead of a 12/12 pitch it is a 4/12 pitch with rafters and planks, no plywood.  The builders were a little cheap with the collar ties.  Instead of dimensional 2x4s and tongue and groove planking inside and out, it is modern 2x4s and only drywall on the inside.  At night we lie in bed and listen to the roof creak and pop under the weight of the snow.  It is a great incentive to get out there and shovel  Afterall, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Winter Projects

 During the winter I keep a list of small projects that never seem to get done so if I have a day when I can't figure out something productive to do, I can refer to the list.  Things that make the list are things like cleaning the oven or cleaning and polishing winter boots... recovering the cushions on the porch rockers.  You know how it is.  There are always tasks both large and small that never seem to be finished.  Some of these things are still garden items.  

I have as many pests in the garden as anyone, particularly those that want to eat my food before I do and I am always brainstorming new ways to out smart them.  A few seasons ago I had trouble with sweet corn and then last spring I had a lot of trouble keeping mice (presumably) from eating my cucumber and summer squash seeds out of my germination tray.  I like to plant the seeds in 4" pots and leave them in the garden under a little hoop house to germinate and I get better results than direct sowing.  Usually.  

Last year I kept finding empty holes where seeds should be each morning. I tried placing a second row cover on top of the trays and then tried hiding it in the cold frame.  I even set mouse traps under the row cloth but they were only interested in fresh seeds.  And once they found the snack tray they kept coming back night after night.  After several rounds of seeds I resorted to bringing the tray indoors every night.  I have thought of something else that might work.

I used my largest tray as a size guide.

I will be able to push the edges into the soil and pin them down with earth staples to keep the thieves from just slipping underneath.

This should add one more layer of defense and be easy to water through.  The cage will also allow me to wrap the tray in a second layer of row cover without crushing the potential seedlings.  One more project checked off the list.

Feels Like Actual Winter

 Our past two winters were very mild for our area.  I heard many people say "I wish it would just get cold and stay cold" because the freeze/thaw cycle turns driveways into skating rinks.  Just when you get things plowed and packed down and manageable, it would all melt into a sheet of ice and then disappear completely and we would have to start all over again.

It is kind of difficult at this point to determine how much snow we got during this last cold snap.  When it started, the ground was still wet and warm and many layers melted slowly into the mud before the ground firmed up.  You have to look at a hard, cold surface to determine how much snow you actually got.  And a lot of that has either compacted or blown off.  I would say we got about a foot.

This is a good time to walk around and see how the deer protection is holding up.   I usually do this during the January Thaw, but when I looked out the window this morning I saw so many tracks I decided I'd better walk around and check things out.

Grids placed over the whiskey barrels protect the evergreen Heuchera

I was watching a gardening show on PBS once and the Southerner landscaping "expert" stated that white tail deer don't eat grass...  Its true that the bulk of their diet is "browse" or leafy ends of woody stemmed plants on the edges of wooded areas, but our white tails eat lawn grass all year 'round.  They have been hitting the lawns hard this week trying to fill their empty stomachs.

The weather is cold and they are HUNGRY.  The ground under any oak tree in the area has been ravaged as they search for nuts.  Every night they make the rounds and check to see if our evergreen shrubs are still fenced today....

Darn it... no False Cypress snack tonight.  Maybe tomorrow night?
We'll check back.

They check all over the landscape, including this Heuchera, which gets nibbled at the edges.

They tromped all over this Itoh Peony, freeing it from its igloo of snow, probably wanting to walk through and being stopped by the strategically placed section of hog panel. Foiled again!  Then they trip over all of the wire cloches protecting the Primrose from the rabbits.

It sure would be nice to eat a fresh, green, Primrose salad...

This morning it was officially somewhere between 10F and 13F depending on which weather service you consulted.  Because we are at a higher elevation , we are "warmer" at 17 degrees.

We are in for several more weeks of cold temperatures, but thankfully we are enjoying some sun.  November and December are always the cloudiest months of our year while January and February can often be clear and bright.  A little sunshine goes a long way.