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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 19, 2022 16:24:42 GMT -6
Today has been a weird one weather-wise. Yesterday was bright, sunny, and in the sixties. Last night's temperatures were very, very, mild. It had only gotten down to 50 degrees by seven o'clock this morning, but made up for that by dropping to 35 degrees by noon. (That's kind of brisk with the 30 mph winds that came along with this morning's cold front).
Despite the fact that it has been misting rain most of the day, I've been out there in my garden, keeping busy before the really bad stuff hits later on tonight. The forecast is calling for a 50% chance of snow this evening and for temperatures to plummet into the low teens by morning. It's freezing rain and sleeting right now.
I've been busy spreading a 55-gallon barrel full of Bio-char that I cooked up last winter. I inoculated it with chicken litter, urea, topsoil, and goose water last summer. It has been aging for several months and needed to be spread in the garden. I got that done today, then started crushing the charcoal for the next inoculation. After crushing the next batch of charcoal, I added about 20 pounds of chicken litter from my henhouse, about 10 pounds of topsoil, and about 10 gallons of water from the goose pond. I'll let that cure for a few months, then add it to the garden come Spring.
In the meantime, I'm re-loading an empty bio-char barrel with dried asparagus brush, dead okra stalks, broken twigs, small limbs laying around in the woods, and pieces of wood smaller than 3" inches in diameter. I'm packing it in tightly, so that it cannot ignite when I light the fire under it at a later date.
When it's time to lite it, I'll lay the barrel on its side, wire the lid ring shut, so it won't fall off from warping, place a log under each end of the barrel, so air can travel under it, and light a hot, scrap wood fire under it to cook the contents into charcoal. That all takes about 6 hours.
Then, I'll let the fire die down and cover any air holes with dirt and plug them good with mud. I'll let that rest a few days, then I'll open the barrel to see what kind of charcoal is left inside.
This is a perpetual process. At that time, I'll shovel out the bio-char that I inoculated earlier, then re-fill that barrel with this new stuff and inoculate it too. When I've emptied the burn barrel into the empty inoculation barrel, I'll refill the burn barrel with more twigs, sticks, dead branches, okra stalks, whatever looks like it might make good charcoal and set it up to burn again.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 19, 2022 19:17:10 GMT -6
That cold weather that hit you at noon is moving south. We had 76 and sunny today, and I was breaking into just a bit of a sweat as I was hauling around a big doghouse and plywood to make protection for our lime tree. I put rebar in the ground and made a polypipe support to wrap our bigger lemon in frost cloth. The lemon had the benefit of the doghouse last year during our freeze (and a poultry brooding lightbulb), so it’s the one that die back at all. It’s now over my head, so it was a job to wrap. The lime is shorter than it used to be, so it got the doghouse. The second lemon died all the way to the ground, but it sprouted this summer and looks true, but it’s still tiny. It just got a heavy pot.
I also spread frost cloth over all the onions. I know they can take cold, but I’m not sure that they’ve really had a chance to get acclimated, and we’re supposed to get to the low 20’s tomorrow. I didn’t want to cover them, but I did. My five year old used his five gallon wheelbarrow to bring me rocks so that I could weight the edges down around all four raised beds. Once we were done with that we got out the adult-sized wheelbarrow and brought a load of firewood from our barn to our house. It felt kind of bizarre to be doing all of this work while wearing a t-shirt and shorts! This roller-coaster weather is crazy!
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 19, 2022 20:41:32 GMT -6
Chrysanthemum,
You'll thank yourself for all of your hard-fought efforts later. Last April 20th, we had a freak storm that brought snow and temperatures in the twenties overnight. My fruit trees and berries were in full bloom. I usually cover my blueberry bushes while they are in bloom like that, but for some reason, I didn't do it that time (maybe too many false alarms?) Anyhow, I lost my entire crop of berries last summer as a result.
Live and learn I guess.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 21, 2022 8:20:18 GMT -6
My blueberries have been getting confused this winter. It was somewhat cool in November though never a frost or freeze, but December was really warm. I had flowers on a couple plants, and one plant even had enough time to produce berries (not ripe ones, of course). They all froze in our hard freeze at the New Year. I figured there wasn’t any point in trying to protect them now as there are no more open flowers now. I don’t know what they’ll produce later, but this roller coaster weather has been crazy.
We didn’t get as cold last night as forecast, but we have another cold night forecast for tonight, so I’ll leave my covers in place till tomorrow.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 21, 2022 10:29:08 GMT -6
It was 8 degrees here at 7:00 am this morning. It looks like the worst of it has passed. The good news is that we gain about 2 minutes and 7 seconds of daylight per day this time of year. We officially gained an extra hour of daylight by January 18th. So maybe, the cold weather's days are numbered? You never know though? Last year, the really cold stuff didn't get here until February.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 30, 2022 9:44:25 GMT -6
Forecast is calling for 19 down here for a couple nights later this week. At least I left the rebar and polypipe up around the big lemon, and the remay and clamps are easily accessible.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 31, 2022 16:07:42 GMT -6
It's 70 degrees here today, but the day after tomorrow's forecast is calling for a 90% chance of snow and temperatures plummeting into the low teens. Swings like that are what kill plants. Today, they are trying to bud out, 72 hours from now they'll be frozen solid as a rock in the wood that bears the buds.
That happened back in 2011 too. It warmed into the high 60s in early February, then dropped to 15 below zero and snowed for two weeks, freezing the partially formed blossoms in the wood. When warm weather came in March and April, we had no blossoms at all. They had all been killed by the harsh freeze in February.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 2, 2022 19:45:39 GMT -6
I think it was 70 yesterday here. Today it was cloudy and misty so only got up to 59, but I noticed buds on an apple tree today as I was wheeling a wheelbarrow through our backyard to haul more firewood from our barn into our house. It’s supposed to drop below freezing tonight and stay that way all day tomorrow while the precipitation is supposed to intensify. We may drop to the teens for the next two nights. I don’t now how much ice we might get, but my husband helped me cover up the lemons and lime and the onions today, and I got my one artichoke plant under a pot. I think the garlic should be able to withstand the cold. It has some leaf mulch on it, but I haven’t been able to get any on the onions yet. My kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce seedlings got their roots pruned a bit, as I’m trying to keep them in their starter plugs through this cold snap. I had hoped to set them out last weekend but thankfully saw the forecast for this week before I actually did it.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 2, 2022 20:37:48 GMT -6
We have about an inch of snow on the ground right now and it looks like more is on the way. The forecast is calling for temperatures close to zero by Saturday morning.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 3, 2022 5:01:25 GMT -6
Bon,
Last Autumn, I went to a farm conference that had a farm tour afterwards and saw the coolest thing I think I've ever seen anyone make in a long time. It was an old junkyard find, double door, reach-in cooler that looked like it had come from an old 7/11 or something. The glass in the doors had been broken out but the farmer had replaced the glass in the door frames with ill-fitting Styrofoam board-type insulating panels. They used old plywood and pallet boards to keep the Styrofoam secured to the door frames. They were using an old crockpot full of water as a heat source inside and were using the heated space inside to sprout seedlings in cold weather.
The refrigerator was about 5' feet wide, so it held two or three seed trays per shelf. It had an LED light strip inside to give the seedlings UV light once they were sprouted.
That setup opens the door to all sorts of possibilities for using old, junkyard chest freezers, or junk refrigerators for doing the same sort of things. The farmer said that the Crock-pot with water in it held the inside temperature of the junkyard refrigerator near 90 degrees on the low setting. Of course it took a little time for it to reach that temperature, but once there, the Crockpot held it there nicely.
I love seeing people think outside the box in situations like that.
I just happen to have a dead chest freezer in my shop that if it were scrubbed out would probably make an excellent seed sprouting box, very similar in function to the reach-in cooler thing I saw last Autumn. I might have to scrub the old melted ice cream and whatnot out of the bottom of it and give it a try. A person could probably acquire such an item, just for the price of offering someone to haul it off. The one they had was already stripped of its copper and compressor by the time they saw it, making it all that much lighter for them to haul away to the farm.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 3, 2022 5:27:21 GMT -6
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Post by macmex on Feb 3, 2022 10:03:23 GMT -6
I guess they were using a tame groundhog. Hadn't thought about it before, but picking up any other kind would mean you'd get bitten for sure! I used to catch them by hand, but never picking them up the way they did in that photo.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 3, 2022 12:57:47 GMT -6
George,
I got a chuckle out of that groundhog photo that you posted. Thanks, for posting that. I needed a good laugh.
We got about 5" inches of powder snow here overnight.
I called my step-mom a few minutes ago to wish her a happy birthday. She was out on the tractor, feeding her cows and chopping ice on her ponds. She runs about 40 head of mama cows on 210 acres and has three ponds to chop. She just turned 75 today. She's 14 years older than I am and can still work me into the ground.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 8, 2022 8:39:13 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, my mother is 38 years older than I am. It’s still my aspiration to become just one quarter of the amazing woman that she is! The extended forecast for the nights has us now above freezing going forward. I took the frost cloth off my onions yesterday, and today I’ll uncover the lemons, lime, and artichoke.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 14, 2022 12:49:45 GMT -6
What a day! 23 degrees at 5:30 this morning and 65 by noon!
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