Weathering the Storm
The warm, moist air off of the Pacific finally pushed out the frigid arctic mass that was sitting over the Pacific Northwest for almost a week. It wasn’t the lowest temperatures I’ve ever seen in my time at illahe but it wasn’t that far off, we got to 14 overnight with several nights well below 20 degrees. Some of the readers of this blog shared their extremes from Montana to Colorado and of course by those standards 14 is nothing. I spent some time at Montana State University in Bozeman in the late 1990’s and I remember a week that it got down to -20, I went outside and my nostrils froze shut. One of the more unique of the challenges we are seeing with climate change in the Pacific Northwest is huge temperature swings, from a high of 61 this weekend to sub 20’s last week. If the plants were all just frozen and dormant it would be no big deal since the bulk of them are very hardy. As you will see in the gallery this week, there is a lot of action already happening in the bulb house. Click on the gallery to take a short tour of what is in bloom this week.
Taking stock after the storm, the bulb house was fine as covered in the previous post, I took a lot of precautions. Some of the outside landscape did not fair so well unfortunately. Remember that beautiful Daphne ‘Perfume Princess’ that was about to burst forth into bloom? Well it’s now a skeletal figure with a few pink dot’s at the end of blackened branches, having lost all of it’s leaves. I guess the D. bhoula as a parent makes it not quite so hardy, since all the other Daphnes here look quite happy after the heavy winter weather. Fortunately, all the hoop houses stayed up despite a pretty heavy load of snow and Ice, some of my friends to the South weren’t so lucky as it the Southern part of the valley got hit especially hard.
Chaco and I spent the week dodging rain storms and post holing for the new greenhouse footings.
The bulb house is starting to fill up with color, with a new Narcissus coming on just about every day now and the Crocus collection just waiting for a few sunny days. Corydalis henrikii is loaded with blooms this year and i’ll post up a bio on that one when it’s really popping. Between rain showers I’m madly working on the new greenhouse project, of course this winter the weather days have been all over the place slowing progress down on that. Sowing seeds and potting up cuttings coming off the propagation bench in preparation for the spring that will come.
Cheers,
Mark