The great plunge of January
Sunday, January 11, 2015
The really cold part of the winter usually has the good sense to wait until sometime in January before seriously annoying us in the City. Well, right on the heels of the Three Kings, it’s here. Some assorted scenic snowfalls and then The Plunge blew in. Thanks guys. The snow was a nice present but you could at least have shut the door behind you. Took the garden down to 10.8˚ F (-12˚ C) on Wednesday night, The Plunge did. Brrrrr. Luckily the worst of it blew right out again but the dry, frigid air gusting to thirty miles an hour, or so, didn’t exactly improve the chill. I think it moved out and over the Atlantic to do some even more serious blowing around in the British Isles.
I’d covered all the things that needed covering with generous piles of pine straw way back in early December. It’s a really good insulator so I wasn’t so worried about the actual cold. Things underground are slumbering away nicely in their long winter’s nap. I poke a stick down through every now and then, out of curiosity. And to reassure myself. The exposed ground can be as hard as a rock but under even a couple of inches of pine straw, the slick slides right in. That’s always reassuring.
I was actually more concerned about the effects of that frozen wind. Gusts of thirty miles an hour, with a dew point of just a few degrees Fahrenheit, can really do a job on the exposed parts of plants. Sounds even worse if you measure it in Celsius. Minus fifteen. Not that the plants care which scale I use. They get blasted either way. That kind of wind does more damage than simple cold. Evergreens get desiccated. Especially badly after a winter’s worth of that treatment. I just have to look at how the short layer of fluffy snow on the patio quickly started evaporating under the wind to remind myself. Cover up.
The Fuchsia+Blog Tags — garden | hortulus fuchsiarum | winter
