With over three feet of snow in less than a week, there is little time to think about gardening. My wife and I are from the school that likes to make many small trips outside to incrementally shovel rather than waiting for all the snow to fall so that it must be removed in one shot. But that is what happened last week as nearly two feet of snow was dumped in our area between 10 pm on Tuesday night and 7 am Wednesday morning. There was nothing incremental about it. Just large blades full of snow that were slowly and carefully removed.
When we go outside, there is a silence that is unique. There are no cars, no planes, nothing. Not even a barking dog. The snow deadens all sound so the only thing you hear is your own breathing and the scrape of the shovel on the ground. At night it seems even more quiet and spiritual as the spotlights reflect on the falling snow. It is a magical time.
There is little time to reflect on that as my driveway and garden need to have vast quantities of snow removed. For me this is ironic as for once I had a good start this year on the fall (and winter) garden with us harvesting salads for two to three days a week through Thanksgiving. But then the cold hit and the raised beds froze up. And when we started to get a bit of a thaw, we started to get hit with snow every week.
It’s been a battle to keep the beds uncovered and this week I gave up trying to keep the back hoop clear, which has delicate little rosettes of miner’s lettuce growing nicely; at least they were last time I saw them in mid December. This winter’s experiment will be how well a hoop house can hold back snow.
The trouble with this much snow is that there is no place to throw it anymore. Three sides of my greenhouse have four feet of snow snuggled up next to them with over two feet on the roof. I’m hoping it will melt down over the week. It won’t.
One of the things I learned over the years is to leave the garden gate open before its snows because if you don’t and more than 6 inches fall, you can’t get it open. So I pry the gate open and put yet more snow on top of the strawberry beds as well as those that don’t have any vegetables growing. One of the beds is being used to winter-over some bushes I didn’t have time to plant this fall. We’ll see how well they do under five feet of snow.
It seems futile but I carefully remove layer by layer of snow from the cold frame and hoop house. They both have yet to collapse. The hoop house clips have held on to the Agribon and protected the now desiccated Swiss chard, romaine lettuce, beets, and assorted greens. My salads still may recover though it is hard to believe as both structures are bracketed by two feet of snow on all sides. With the sun and temperatures low and the frames pointing north, they will get little light or heat for weeks to come.
During the past week the neighborhood birds have ravaged the feeders as the snow has long since covered any food on the ground. The birds are perched in a nearby Japanese Maple like so many Christmas ornaments. Bobwhites, cardinals, pine siskins, chickadees, doves, finches, sparrows, bluebirds and the appropriately named snowbirds are just some of the ever changing decorations. They appear much larger than they are as they fluff their clothing to stay warm. The woodpeckers and blue jays don’t perch with the others; they have their own places to go.
They queue on the tree, which is near a feeder, as they wait their turn to grab a few sunflower seeds before flying back. It is a chaotic and un-orderly process as the larger aggressor birds take their time feeding, scaring other competitors away. So the smaller birds wait and bide their time hoping for a chance to grab a few seeds so they can survive another cold day.
