Good morning, and FIRST! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
We had a couple of events occur in Denver on Wednesday, and the teevee stations didn't know what to do.
Leading up to the Not-So-Great-Debate we had saturation coverage: they're putting the STAGE together! They're having a LOTTERY for DU students to get tickets! They're gonna have LIVE BANDS and GAMES on campus! They're gonna close massive numbers of ROADS surrounding the campus! For days before hand, it was all-debate-all-the-time, interspersed with incessant campaign commercials.
At the same time, however, Denver's first blast of really cold weather was set to arrive — an event that, in a normal year, would have been the item of saturation coverage.
As it happened, the debate and the cold front arrive at just about the same time; between 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., the temperature dropped from the high of 83° to 52°. Arwen the Terrible was on the lookout — the pooties had been helping me out in the yard as I took advantage of the last blast of warmth to prepare for the cold to come.
As it happened, we got Denver's FIRST snow, and FIRST freeze, at the same time early Friday morning.
On Wednesday, I left my little office early; the forecast was that, with the cold front would come the possibility of a rain/snow mix and the possibility of our first freeze. While I didn't really expect either the snow or the freeze to materialize — Denver forecasters having a tendency to over-predict the severity of the first cold blast — I knew I needed to give the lawn a last mowing, and I wanted to avoid picking tomatoes from cold, wet vines and moving cold, dripping brugmansias into the house.
It stayed cold on Thursday and the high was only 49°; and yesterday morning we awoke to falling snow and the first official freeze. The photo was taken from the back deck of the building where my office is. Now, that "official freeze" was out at the airport, and here in the city it didn't get quite that cold, plus the coating of snow helped protect the tender plants from the low temperatures. The tomato and melon vines aren't even frost-nipped.
The snow moved out quite quickly and the sun broke through early yesterday morning; I caught this shot of sun and clouds at about 7:00 a.m.
And almost immediately the next band of clouds rolled in.
And the forecast for today is for more cloudy, cold, drippy — and for an overnight low dipping into the 20s, so we'll likely get a real freeze tonight.
So I went to the grocery store and stocked up on ingredients for cold-weather comfort food — meatloaf, beef bourguignon, apple crisp. The living room is a jungle of brugmansia and jasmines, and my order of hyacinth bulbs for forcing was delivered yesterday evening.
So this weekend will be spent cooking, napping and clearing out the cold storage space so I can store the tender plants there and send them into dormancy.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?