First ice
Even though we haven't
had a frost yet, weird microclimate effects resulted in homegrown ice
Tuesday morning. I'd let a little rainwater accumulate in the
wheelbarrow, and the metal dissipated heat in such a way that a low of
34 resulted in a skim of ice. Strange, huh?
Meanwhile, the sun has
drifted low
enough in the sky that we don't see light in our core homestead
until mid-morning. Although the north-facing exposure of our
plateau makes me envious of our neighbor's sun, it does provide some
dramatic lighting.
Do you think we'll make
it to Halloween without a frost?
Our automatic chicken waterer makes it easy to leave town
for the weekend without worrying about your flock.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We were supposed to have our first frost last night, but it didn't happen. We knew before sundown that it wouldn't frost. So it will probably be a couple more weeks before the next frost opportunity happens.
I love fall. Made my first butternut squash soup of the season. Delicious.
Sara --- Good question. Our neighbor doesn't actually garden, but we do a lot to work around being a on north-facing slope. The mule garden is located as far from the hillside as we can get and stay on our flat plateau, so we do all of our spring and fall gardening there. We also moved our laying flock to a pasture just beyond the mule garden so they enjoy winter sun as well.
I've been reading that a north-facing slope is good for holding early spring bloomers back so they don't get nipped by late frosts. We have a lot of trouble with that, and I'm thinking of trying out a few trees closer to the hillside --- they'd get more summer shade, but might miss those pesky frosts. So it's not completely a bad situation to be in.