One Summer Long Ago...

Things that transport us back to our youth sometimes pop up in the strangest places.

One of my Facebook Friends is in Minnesota with the blizzards this week. Other friends have suggested that he bring back some snow seeing as how we have none here in Silicon Valley. He packed a jar full of snow and is planning to bring it back in his checked luggage. It should be "amusing" getting it through security what with not one, but two flight security "issues" happening on two consecutive days this week in Detroit.

And that's what triggered the memory of the summer I spent in and around Springfield, MO, with my Grandma and her new husband when I was thirteen.

Grandma had moved to Missouri some years earlier to care for her elderly and failing parents, then stayed on to live there. One day her sister and brother-in-law who also lived in Springfield took Grandma with them out to a farm to pick up some bales of hay (I think) for the brother-in-law's small farm. And that's where Grandma met her new beau. It was his parent's farm.

Some time later, they married. It was early January and bitter-cold in the heartlands. And I went to my Grandma's wedding! That summer, Grandma and her new hubby invited me and my younger brother to come and visit them for most of the summer.

That was one amazing summer!

I learned how to milk a cow. I drew up water, pulling a rope hand-over-hand, because the well at the farm had no pump. I counted and fed sheep daily. I helped mow, turn, bail, stack, and store alfalfa. I picked wild raspberries, blackberries, and gooseberries. I got chiggers and ticks (and learned to spray the chiggers with AquaNet and how to carefully remove the ticks). I caught and rode the paint pony (much to my new Grandpa's chagrin) that had been running wild on the place since before I was born. I cooked on an old iron wood-fired stove. I saw the inside of a dairy where we sold the milk. And I learned how to drive on a 1946 Ford tractor.

When it came time to head for home, Grandma sprang a couple of extra boxes on us. These were boxes of the size one packs books in for moving. It turns out that Grandma and new Grandpa packed quart after quart of those berries we all picked into freezer boxes and put them into her deep freeze. Grandpa went out the day before we left and got a bunch of dry ice and put boxes of frozen berries and dry ice into these book boxes.

You know what dry ice does? It "sublimes" into cold, gaseous carbon dioxide. It gives off a fog. So, off to the airport we go with two "smoking" book boxes! In those days, nobody thought anything of it. These days? Well, Homeland Security would have been all over us.

Bloom Day Again! GBBD 15 December 2009

Here it is, Garden Blogger Bloom Day, all over again!  Well, there's not much blooming in my yard today.

• Calendula (just a couple)
• Strawberries (just a few)
• Nasturtium (just a couple under the eaves, the rest are toast from the freeze)
• Jade Plant
• Impatiens
• White Potato Vine
• Plumbago (the vining variety; the creeping variety is toast from the freeze)
• Sticky Monkey Flower! (Yay! One of my California natives!)

What Do I Do About Freezing Temperatures?

As I pointed out in my last post, we've been getting below-freezing overnight temperatures. In my microclimate, I got three straight nights of below freezing temperatures. So, what do I do about my plants?

Some plants are definitely warm-loving, cold-hating plants. Those are mostly the veggies of summer like squash, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, ... Wait! Tomatoes!

Yeah, tomatoes like it hot. They are native to the sub-tropics. After several nights of near-freezing and a couple of nights of freezing temperatures, my beefsteak tomato is looking quite sad.

(Since he wasn't producing, I left him uncovered as a "control.")  On the other side of that bed, I threw a couple of sheets over the cherry tomato plant. It wasn't pretty...

but it seems to have done some good.

The outer leaves were they were touching the sheet were a little sad, but the rest is still doing fine. And, yes, I have had cherry tomato plants continue producing into February in a stupendously cold winter here in the valley. Of course, the plant was up against the house, under an eave, on a west-facing wall that got sun from noon.  But no other protection was offered.

I was a little worried about the lettuce, so I threw a sheet over them, too. Again, not at all pretty.

But after the freeze they were quite giggly and festive.

On other fronts, cabbage is a known cold-season crop. Cabbage can survive under a blanket of snow.

The white on the leaves is frost, like the kind you had to scrape off your windshield.  In this close-up, that droplet of water is actually a droplet of ice.

So, despite freezing temperatures and some less-than-lovely sheets hastily thrown over some plants, I still have plenty to harvest here in mid-December.

The basket has four or five kinds of lettuce, some beet greens, and baby bok choi. Tastes like summer! Yummy!

Looks Like a Cold Winter

This morning the thermometer on the deck greeted me with a shiver.

While the rest of the northern hemisphere may not think this is very cold, we in the Silicon Valley see this as quite frigid. Today the news reports are filled with today's predicted highs along with record-low highs. The record-low highs for this date go back to 1972. For San Jose, I think the number is 43F, but we're predicted to get to 46F, so no record there... but close.

I remember the December of 1972 quite well. I was a college freshman and had moved to an apartment of my own on December 1st. Within a week, the water-filled potholes behind my apartment had frozen over. And they STAYED that way for three weeks!

Here in the Silicon Valley we are blessed with a lovely Mediterranean climate. Since I have a nice covered deck, I usually have a lot of plants out on the deck. Many of these plants are considered "houseplants" because they are from sub-tropical areas, but they are quite happy out on my deck... unless the weather gets below freezing!

So, I spent the day yesterday bringing all the "houseplants" back indoors. Let's just say that Christmas dinner is going to be a little crowded this year.

I also spent the day covering the more tender of my vegetables -- specifically, the cherry tomato and the lettuce are covered with old bed sheets (that have been used as paint drop cloths). Hopefully I'll continue to have fresh veggies coming out of the garden.

And, yes, it got cold enough for long enough that the bird bath also froze. I had to go out with some hot water to melt a hole in the ice so the birdies can drink.

(Yes, that's a rock on the ice. I set it there so I could focus. The camera was disinclined to focus on the ice or the leaves frozen in the ice and it was too dark for my eyes to resolve the image through the lens.)