January 2024: Cold and Atmospheric

January was cold and then it turned frigid. We spent the middle of the month in a polar vortex which brought temperature highs down below freezing and lows into the single digits for more than a week. Add in some windy days, and we had wind chill warnings on top of it all.

Even with the new Feralvillas that I’d gotten for the outdoor cats, I didn’t have confidence that we could keep them sufficiently warm, so we evacuated them to an emergency shelter. We did the same during similar weather last year. They spent 11 days together in a small bathroom and were very much ready to go home by the end of it. They did stay safe and warm, however.

There were no particular happenings in my garden during January, but we were treated to a range of natural beauty. There were cold, crystal-clear sunsets with slivers of moon, enough snow to smooth and brighten the landscape, a stunning sunrise, and particularly dense and mysterious fog.

At the end of the month, I saw the first signs of spring as a few hellebore leaves and buds began to emerge from beneath the dried leaves. There are also some early crocuses, bluebells, and daffodils starting to poke up above the ground.

The sharp-shinned hawks that live in a huge oak across the street are more noticeable and active as the days start to get longer. The other day, I was walking Perry at lunch and noticed a pile of feathers in the backyard next door. When I looked more closely, the hawk was still eating its meal there in the yard. It flew off with its kill (probably a pigeon, judging by the feathers). I’ve noticed the hawk family for years and it’s been interesting to see their activity throughout the seasons.

December 2022: Polar Plunge

December dawned a little warmer than usual, but not much. There were cold spells with lows in the 20’s, and there were sprinklings of rain here an there. Most color had faded from my garden, save the last of the leaves to turn and fall: the leaves on my blackberry. Every year they are some of the last bits of red, yellow, orange, and green to leave my garden. I always enjoy seeing them. Meanwhile, the last of the tomatoes left on the vines withered away to nothing, but indoors I had one final round of fresh tomatoes that I’d picked green in November and that had ripened on my counter. Fresh garden tomatoes in December! John and I baked them with chickpeas and feta for a tasty meal.

Mid-December, John and I got a Christmas tree. This year we didn’t even check the traditional spot in a strip mine where we and others from Patchwork had gone to collect cedar trees for decades. If you remember, lately it’s only been John and I going to get trees there and last year when we went it just felt like too much had changed and it was no longer a good idea. So last year and this year we got a normal commercial tree. Times change.

Just before Christmas, I pulled a year’s worth of raspberries and two years’ worth of blackberries from my freezer and turned them into jam. I like blackberry jam a lot better without seeds, so I used my Squeezo Strainer to separate them out before making jam. It was more difficult than it should have been because I got impatient with the slow-to-thaw berries and tried to run them through when they were still a little frozen. Eventually I got one batch of raspberry jam, two batches of blackberry jam, and one batch of blackberry preserves.

What’s the difference between jam and preserves, you ask? Well, I accidentally used half the sugar I should have on my last batch of jam. I knew I should have made myself check the recipe, but instead I told myself that it was the fourth time through and I remembered the recipe just fine. I didn’t realize my mistake until I noticed that the jam hadn’t gelled correctly. I looked online to find a remedy and the first search result started with the words of wisdom, “If you don’t want to invest any additional work in that jam, the best choice to make is to change your expectations. If the finished product is just sort of runny, call it preserves (they can be great stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or spooned over waffles). If it’s totally sloshy, label it syrup and stir it into sparkling water.”

As I was finishing the jam, a serious winter storm was gathering. Snow and extreme cold air were forecast to hit our area in the afternoon on December 22. Everyone was urged to get our affairs in order. Suddenly we were prepping our home and workplace for bad weather at the same time as we were preparing work to be closed for the holidays. On the day the storm blew in, the high temperature on my weather station was 44 degrees and the low at bedtime was 3 degrees with a windchill of -10 degrees. Very early in the morning on December 23, the low on my weather station got down to -6 degrees and the windchill reached at least -19 degrees. In other areas around the city where the wind could blow even harder, the windchill got to at least -29 degrees. On Christmas, it was still cold. Christmas night it snowed more. Things started to ease on December 26, but it was still plenty cold.

It was stressful. One night we had an alarm going off on our furnace at home. We had a couple furnaces at work limping along and spent time during our holiday working to keep them going. We had a pipe briefly freeze at home. We were monitoring two buildings at work and the four cats sheltered in them. We pushed off leaving to visit my family for Christmas once then again then just decided to stay home. Since we’d intended to be gone, we hadn’t stocked up on groceries before Christmas, but we still managed to use things we had around to make a fancy Christmas feast of Chicken Cordon Bleu and roasted sweet potatoes from my garden.

The snow was pretty while it lasted, enhancing all of my outdoor Christmas lights. After it melted and the weather warmed, I did notice that many of my plants that normally stay evergreen through the Southwestern Indiana winters have turned black. The leaves on the honeysuckle on the back fence are brown and limp. The azaleas in the front have many leaves that turned brown and are falling off. I will be interested to see how well things come back to life in the spring. Clearly this weather was on the colder end of what they can tolerate.

And with that, we ended 2022! Now it’s time to look toward next summer and to start ordering my seeds.

November 2022: Final Harvests

Remarkably, the month of November began still with no killing frost or freeze. We came close very early on, so I harvested all the tomatoes I could find along with all of my sweet potatoes. It’s always interesting to see what I have growing underground in the sweet potato patch. The vines looked healthy this year, but did they produce sweet potatoes? The answer was yes! I got a good harvest and can tell that there are several varieties represented in that harvest. Some have orange flesh and some are all purple, but, as in previous years, the best grower was a Japanese variety that has purple skin and dry, white flesh. They’re all tasty.

I’ve been growing the sweet potatoes in a raised bed that contains sandy soil, so to harvest them I just reach my hands into the earth and feel around for the lumps of potato. The whole process is a lot of work, particularly because I have to dismantle my Boo Boo butt shield (aka: the metal hoops covered in bird net to keep the cats out because…you know…sandy soil). I let the sweet potatoes cure for a few weeks and then we roasted some to sample. They were excellent.

That same weekend I also raked up all the leaves on the ground. I wanted to make sure to do it before they started to break apart and smother the grass under them. They were still wonderfully fluffy and colorful when I raked them, which made them much easier to deal with. Normally the leaves would be coming off the trees a little after we had a frost, so I’d just get my leaf blower out and blow the leaves into my garden beds to decompose over the winter. This year, however, everything was still growing when the leaves came down, so I bagged them all up to store temporarily. I’ll spread them on my garden beds as I clear those beds out for the winter. I got 15 big bags of leaves, including some nice maple leaves I raked up from my neighbor’s house!

The cold snap didn’t materialize as early as first expected, but from the forecasts it was certain to arrive in the third week of November, so I picked one final round of lima beans and tomatoes before it hit. For the record, I picked them all on November 11 with weather so pleasant I didn’t need to wear a jacket. Then on November 12 we had a surprise snowfall followed by frigid temperatures. Finally all of the summer’s growth stopped in my garden. Sadly for me, the snowfall occurred on the one day I was out of town visiting friends, so I missed it! Hopefully this won’t be the one and only snowfall of the year, but that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.

In my absence, I told John to take my camera out and capture some images of the snow on top of green, blooming plants. He did, so all the photos below with snow in them are thanks to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of still-vibrant plants frozen under snow. The concern that this raises is whether the plants will be damaged by the quick change from temperature highs in the 70’s to a stretch with lows in the 20’s. That other year that I mentioned earlier when the only snow came in November, we had a similar shift in temperature and my plants were damaged because they hadn’t gone through their normally gradual autumnal shutdown. Adding to the potential plant stress this year was the fact that our area’s moderate drought continued into November. In fact, we got only about three-quarters of an inch of rain for the entire month. I tried to counteract this by watering up until the freeze.

After the snow and cold weather finally killed things off, I was able to start clearing this year’s plants out of my garden and start planting for next year. I reworked the soil in my main raised bed for vegetables, adding leaves and stirring things around with a broadfork, then I planted my garlic. The garlic went in a little later than I thought was best, but I’d wanted to get the area cleared and the soil turned and couldn’t do that as easily until things had died back. Time will tell whether it was ok to wait.

Only at the end of the month did the plants finally start to settle back into the earth, with leaves and fruits gradually losing their shapes and colors. Meanwhile, I still had bright, fresh garden tomatoes to enjoy indoors! They’d ripened nicely in a bowl on my counter. It was pretty remarkable to have fresh garden produce at the end of November.

A Cat a Day: March 13

Boo Boo being his usual silly self. Somehow he trapped himself inside these tomato cages and then had to squeeze his way out again. He barely made it.

A Cat a Day: March 11

Percivale’s walk in the snow

A Cat a Day: March 10

Mark walking in accumulated sleet

January 2022: Photogenic Amounts of Snow

As I write this, we’re preparing for a massive ice storm. There seems to be no doubt that we’re going to be hit with significant accumulations of ice. But while we wait to learn our fate, here are some pictures of some much gentler snowfall in January.

I didn’t take any pictures of all the shades of brown in my garden in between the couple snowfalls that we got. It was partly that I didn’t see anything terribly photogenic and partly that there have been several stretches of bitter cold weather so I didn’t get out and walk around in my garden very much.

On the couple non-snowy, non-frigid days, instead of gardening I went to work building Cat Pods to add some extra insulation to the outdoor cats’ heated cat houses. You’ll see more about that in some upcoming Cat of the Day posts.

My Christmas lights are still up. I like the festiveness that they give, especially in the snow. There are several photos of them here so you can appreciate them, too.

And one additional photo: a reminder to pay attention and look around you. I was walking Perry in January and I looked just to the right of an opening in the fence that we pass through almost every day. And finally, in January, I saw that I’d been visited by a monarch butterfly at some point but I didn’t know it until that moment. I finally saw that there were the burst remains of a chrysalis that have been there in front of me for months but I never noticed.

February 2021: Ice and Snow

In this month’s review of my garden: a surprising amount of snow and ice!

Near the beginning of February, we had our first round of snow. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to record the cats’ tracks, so it was official. I took some photos, just in case there wasn’t any additional snow for the winter. During the winter of 2019-2020, there was only one dusting that came in November, so it wouldn’t have been unheard of. Also, on the first day of February I sighted my first crocus, so there was the promise that spring was on its way.

But in retrospect, I didn’t even remember that it snowed that early in February until I went through my photos for the month, because less than a week later we got more wintery weather than we’ve had in years. First came an ice storm. Thankfully, in our area we didn’t get enough ice to do major damage, but we did get enough to provide me with some really nice things to photograph. The rain and sleet started in the morning and continued off and on all afternoon and into the evening, so it built up quite a bit.

Normally around here we would expect everything to melt right away, but the ice was followed by very cold temperatures. Then came a significant snowfall, then extremely cold temperatures, then more snow. In all, we may have gotten 8-10 inches of snow, which was actually less than the forecasters had thought was possible.

We woke up to snow on on the ground on a Monday, then it started to snow again around noon and kept snowing all of the rest of the day. That same week, we got more snow on Wednesday-Thursday. It’s very unusual for this area, but we had ice and/or snow on the ground for about a week and a half, and it stayed well below freezing for the entire time. That created fantastic conditions for cross country skiing! I got mine out. On the first couple days while road conditions were still bad, I only was able to ski down my street and down the alley behind my house. It was still fun!

The predictions at the beginning of all this snow and cold were really dire. In the end, we all made it through in good shape. I was particularly worried about the outdoor cats because temperatures and windchills were going to be so low. They all have spots where they hide from the bad weather, including the heated cat houses on my porch, but I don’t think those cat houses are built for this kind of cold. They’re insulated, waterproof, and heated, but don’t keep the wind out, so at the last minute I added some cardboard boxes as wind baffles. I also made a shelter for their food and I made sure their heated water dish was stocked. The cats managed to stay warm enough, though on the coldest nights there were three cats piled together for warmth in a single house.

Because it was so cold and windy, the first round of snow was beautiful but not particularly photogenic. It didn’t clump into nooks and crannies around my garden nor did it act as icing on top of everything. The second round of snow was a little better for photos.

I have a pair of cross country skis, but I rarely get to use them. Around Southern Indiana, even when there’s enough snow to get them out it’s usually just barely enough snow or there’s a thick layer of slush under the snow or the temperature hovers around 32 degrees so it’s pretty melty. It was really remarkable that we had lots of snow, it was frozen all the way to the ground, and it stuck around for almost a week.

Once the roads got a little better, I wanted to find someplace other than my street to  ski. We don’t have a car that’s built for snowy weather, so I didn’t want to venture too far away and get stuck in a parking area or something, so I stayed pretty close to home. John drove me to the levy near downtown Evansville, dropped me off, and came to get me when I was ready to go home. Years ago, I had friends who would go sledding there. Not many people go there now, so it was perfect for skiing. I had the place to myself and no one disturbed my trail once I’d created it. The water level in the nearby creek was also remarkably low, so there was a nice space between the creek and the levy where I could ski. Other years, I’ve gone along the top of the levy, but the wind had blown some of the snow off up there this year.

I went skiing for four days in a row. By the end, I was tired, but I knew an opportunity like this comes along so rarely that I had to enjoy it while I could. Each day I went a little farther, and the last day I went pretty much as far as I could. I skied from Waterworks Road to the Veterans Parkway/US 41 on ramp and back. Each day, there was a different mix of being overcast, overcast with some breaks in the clouds, and sunny with clouds. It was a pretty spot to ski, even though I was only skiing there because there weren’t many other options.

After the last day of skiing, I made myself some hot chocolate in my special bunny cup. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make us hot chocolate after we went skiing, and that was the main time I got to drink out of my bunny cup, so that’s what makes it special.

Once the thaw came, it came quickly, which was nice. There weren’t lingering ice piles or partially melted snow on the roads. Temperatures shot way above freezing and stayed there. Quickly, more crocuses appeared. And, I have a wonderful array of four orchids that are now blooming in my window. There are bits of spring and hope everywhere!

But then on the last day of February it rained and rained and rained. Overnight we got about 2 inches of rain, breaking local rainfall records. There was a pause in the rain, then it started again. In the end, my rain gauge recorded over 3 inches of rain. In the middle of all of it, my front bottle tree reached its breaking point and tipped over into the yard. Luckily, the ground was super soft from all the rain and cushioned the landing. I managed to pull all the bottles and Christmas lights off of the trunk, and then John wrestled it out of the way. I’m still trying to decide what to do with it. I might try to prop it up with stakes. I don’t think I’ll leave it on its side on the ground, though. It’s just not speaking to me as an art piece while looking like that.

A Cat a Day: March 4

My apologies to the people who already saw this video when I posted it on Facebook, but I like it too much not to share it here as well. This is a video of one of Perry’s walks in the snow. He did not like it. It was during the stretch of extremely cold weather, but on this particular day the temperatures were up into the mid 20’s. The outdoor cats were acting like it was balmy, so I thought Perry might be OK taking a walk. His walks do a lot to improve his attitude and reduce the amount that he bites us, so it’s always helpful when we can get one in. No cats were harmed in the making of this video. Perry went inside afterward and pouted in front of the heat vent, so he was fine.

January 2021: Dormancy and Dustings

Not very much happened in my garden in January, and the proof of that is that I hardly have any photos of it! We got a few dustings of snow, which always make everything look a little more interesting because of the white accents, and that’s about it. It’s still too early for me to start the few seeds that I will start indoors, and this year the earliest crocuses hadn’t yet shown any signs of blooming, so there’s really nothing but dormancy going on.

I have, however, been cooking with garden produce. I started 2021 by making a bean and sweet potato stew. I took all the lima beans and cowpeas that my garden produced in 2020 and dumped them in the slow cooker with some of my sweet potatoes and garlic along with a few other things from the grocery store. The cowpeas are in the same family as the black-eyed peas that many people around here eat for good luck on New Year’s day, so I figure they’ll work. Hopefully dumping a whole year’s worth of my garden’s bounty into a New Year’s pot will guarantee plentiful harvests in 2021.

Later in January I made another round of ravioli from scratch. My recipe calls for squash, but since I have plenty of sweet potatoes sitting around, I decided to use them instead. I tried to find at least one of each of the three colors of sweet potato that I grew, and I was successful. It was amazing how much color just a single, purple sweet potato added to the final filling. To make the ravioli, I roasted the sweet potatoes, garlic, sage, and a shallot (the shallot was the only thing NOT from my garden), then added cheese and pureed it all. Meanwhile, I made pasta dough and ran it through my pasta maker to create thin sheets before piping the filling onto the dough. I boiled the pasta to finish cooking it, then made a browned butter sauce. It was a lot of work, but it was also really delicious!