Frost this Morning

2 common phone weather apps and the truth. If the frozen water and ice on everything didn’t tell you the truth, the apps sure aren’t. It’s below freezing. Currently at 7:30 am it’s 31.1 degrees (the truth). It’s the coolest morning since I set up the little weather station above my garden. It got down to 30 right around sunrise. This is why I don’t trust the apps. They never tell the truth around here. Of course they are reading from less rural areas and that may be true for those areas. There just simply isn’t any official weather station that can handle all the fun little micro climates out here. I’ve had local community members tell me they were 50 degrees in the morning while my pumpkin patch lay blackened from deep frost that same morning. They argue, in disbelief that it happened because they happened to be only a mile or two away as the crow flies.

This time of year I expect killing freezes. It’s mid November. At the farm, I sometimes had my first killing frost in September but usually in October. Luckily, I had a feeling this would happen so I’ve had my marginal tenders in the cold unheated greenhouse like my lemons and cactus.

I bring my lemon grass inside the camper every night it’s not raining along with my little aloe plants. They don’t go outside until it’s at least 45 in the daylight again. So far that method is working to keep everything alive since I no longer have a big farmhouse to shelter all my tenders in. It’s a tight squeeze with just a couple plants coming in every night now.

But as the season turns, nature just does it thing whether I’m ready for it or not. Everyone has to bow to the seasons, however and whenever they come.

This is including the salmon who spend their whole life in preparation to batter themselves against rocks to swim back to where they were spawned and die. Hopefully having spawned themselves before becoming food for the river, the river banks, and the critters that dwell along the Grays. Not all make it of course. Humans are the biggest reason even though humans like to blame the sea lions and wildlife for their demise. But the truth is, sea lions don’t use gill nets and catch thousands at a time. Sea lions don’t destroy and block their habitat. That’s all human doings. Luckily, the Grays is a wild river with no dams. It does what it will and the fish can do as they have always done.