Janurary 8, 2015

Good morning, I am going to take orders today and I encourage you to place them today. It looks like there could be a chance of wintery weather NOAA has the chances of 20% and 30% chance of rain on Saturday. But Sunday is predicted to be nice. The percentages are low enough that it may not happen and just be cold. This is what I am hoping for. Best guess it will not be a repeat of last weekend. Anyone that orders please keep posted Mother Nature has a way of dictating will happen.

Boy Howdy what a wild ride last week was. I have lived in Alpine since June of 2003 and I do not remember there being such a long period of winter precipitation. I will say by New Years Eve, I was getting a little bit of a caged rat feeling. The nice thing is we did not get any supper extra special cold. Although the cold we got sure was damp and seemed to cut to the bone. Funny how the cold part of this past week was typical winter weather in central Oregon. How soon does the blood thin.

Up until this recent cool down, I did not think I was going to put the temporary greenhouses to a test. I had covered them. I had hoped to keep them on through the winter. Mother nature had other designs and we ended up having some near 80 degree days. I feared that the veggies would be scorched and pulled back the film. Monday a week ago I reinstalled the film under the fabric. I also put another layer of 70 over the existing layer of 70. There was plenty of the lighter fabric to cover the other beds with more layers also. I felt I was ready for what ever came our way with this approaching cold.. Luckily we never dropped into the teens.

It seems the stormy week had a 1, 2 punch. Arctic air came in on Tuesday and really chilled things down. It did provide some winter precip but not a lot. Although it was enough to freeze all the fabric to the ground. Monday night was the last time it was above freezing until Saturday. Then for funnzies on Thursday an upper level Pacific Low moved in with lots of moisture and proceeded to start fattening up the tree branches with ice and thoroughly glazing the ground.

It was nasty enough that Ike, Sally, Deb and I decided that it would be prudent to not have market on Saturday. This is only the second time that the market has been closed due to weather. It was a very wise decision!!!

It looked like the worst was over on Saturday morning until the wind picked up and soon brought down the power lines. I have to say that the AEP line men and all the folks that are helping them are beyond AWSOME. We were very fortunate to have our electricity back on shortly after dark on Saturday. Can't thank them enough!!! So for Saturday instead of hearing our hair grow we got some action packed viewing of ice melting out of the trees. Exciting stuff!!!

Well by afternoon a good portion of the ice on the ground and trees had melted. But now instead of the ice sheet there was probably to my recollection, the biggest mud pie I have had the luck to experience since moving to Alpine. And I wasn't going to see how the garden fared.

Sunday I did manage to gaze under some of the fabric and all looked pretty good. I fear that I may have a bit of an aphid problem in the Asian greens. This is one of the beds that got a little frost bitten from the Christmas week storm.

I finally got to look under all the fabric and all of the beds came through with flying colors. One thing that I have noticed with the fabric slow trickles like melting ice or very light rains have a tendency to wick down the fabric and not go through and water the beds. Soo it is kinda funny that the paths and uncovered beds are still wearing gills but the covered beds are dry!!! Plants that were uncovered are showing the signs of exposed duress.

I send this email out on Thursday morn and NOAA is predicting another chance of wintery precipitation for Friday and keeps himing and hawing about it doing the same on Saturday.

I am going to be optimistic that this weather will not be a “show stoper” event and will take orders this week. Kinda feels like I am flying blind but hey this is agriculture!