Yesterday, it was 50 degrees, and the foot or so of snow on the ground was quickly turning the ground into a sloppy mess. We were thrilled to finally experience temperatures above freezing. Better yet, the forecast looks like slightly more temperate weather for the foreseeable future.
We’re beginning to reflect on the last 6 weeks, and it’s obvious that we just went through the most brutal stretch of cold that the farm has seen so far. So, let’s take stock of how things are doing!
Yes, It Was That Cold
Yesterday’s sun and warmth was the first time in nearly 3 weeks that the temperature broke the freezing mark. For 18 days before that, we weren’t even breaking 32F during the height of the day.
Not only did we not break freezing, but we weren’t even close! The majority of days in that stretch were in the teens as high temperatures. We had seventeen days where the lows reached into the single digits, and 3 nights of below-zero temperatures.
This followed the few weeks from late December into mid-January that were relatively cold in their own regard. To put that in perspective, January was in the top 20 coldest of all time in our area, and that list mostly includes cold winters from decades ago. It is even more rare to experience such sustained cold in the age of climate change, where it is much more likely for places like Western PA to experience mild, wet winters.
We got a front row seat to see how our plants and systems fared in such extremes!
How Did The Farm Handle The Cold?
This was the coldest stretch we’ve had here since we started the farm, and boy, could we tell!
Firstly, there was no chance of getting running water in our outbuilding. Our water line to that building is not wholly underground, and though it is well insulated and even heated with electric wire in some spots, it was simply too cold. This meant schlepping water from our home for tasks like seed starting.
We also had to really keep up on tending our wood stove. Our seed starting area is a well-insulated room, but we really need to keep the temperature in the 40s to have enough heat in our germination chamber. Without lighting a fire daily on the wood stove, that room surely would have frozen. That is also the home of our cat, Mai, so we wanted to make sure she could stay as cozy as possible!
The crops in our high tunnel definitely had a rough time! Some things, like romaine lettuce, were simply wiped out by the cold. The few plants we had in there are slowly turning to mush now. Several others, like green onions, cilantro, parsley, arugula, and lettuce aren’t dead, but look very beaten up. Sadly, some of them may not bounce back.
The exception is spinach, the most cold-hardy of all crops we grow! Our spinach, while not growing super quickly, looks as beautiful as it did in November, with little or no damage to be seen.
One other challenge was harvesting. While we didn’t really grow enough to be harvesting huge quantities every week this winter, there were a few stretches of several days where the sun did not warm up the tunnels enough to unfreeze the plants. This is quite rare, so having it happen a few times was significant. In the future, we’ll have to keep that in mind if we expect to harvest every week through winter.
Our Plants Are Still Resilient Overall
Even through such brutal cold, the farm is resilient! Our garlic was outside for all of it, buried in snow, and we expect it to recover perfectly well in the coming weeks. As for us, we are happy that it is warmer! It is firmly into the part of the season where we need to be doing as much bed prep work as we possibly can. Frozen, snow-covered ground makes that challenging, to say the least.
Onward to spring!