Dan, does that new SW Veggie GB have info on the higher altitudes and colder zones? I have been planning on trying more veggies and really know nothing more than what I've already tried like herbs, tomatoes and lettuce.

I think that our sure sign of spring is warm in Boulder, cold and groppling rather than snowing up here. Wheee, time to garden!

J.

It was graupelling heavily here a little while agoÂdidnÂt last long. When I saw it earlier today I thought I was having my first hail storm, but I had to run out into it, and it didnÂt hurt! But I was calling it corn snow! I checked topeka to see what the difference was and came up with too many answers to know for sure what I had! From the pictures I found, I still think it might have been corn snow, but graupel works for me too! With a meteorologist and a couple other weather nuts around here, IÂll probably get a whole bunch more descriptions of both of them!

The wind never got really, really bad here todayÂbut it was bad enough for a while this afternoon to be blowing my TV picture away! I have rabbit earsÂand they donÂt like wind AT ALL!

How are your row covers doing, Dan?

Jennifer, the link below might help you some with your high altitude veggie questions. The info looks pretty logical to me!

Skybird

Here is a link that might be useful: High Altitude Vegetables

Dan: I'm also curious about the row covers. What brand of material do you use? Or does it make a difference?

Skybird: We had some harmless "hail" come down, as well -- and a few really good thunder claps that made people run for cover. Ah, spring...

I mowed the lawn yesterday between hailstorms! Actually, I raced out as the hail first started . . . but it had changed to rain by the time I got to the front yard.

The neighbors' ideas on my craziness have probably not changed.

Actually, the only reason to mow was the small branches that blew down during our "Worse Windstorm since March of 2009" - according to a local newspaper. Nothing special . . .

My son and cousin were talking about "snirt" in Minneasota earlier in March. That, Wikipedia tells me, is dirt blown in with snow . . . we've got that around here but this isn't really the land of the snow blizzard.

In fact, I'm only about 400 miles from the home of the 2010 Winter Olympics (aka The Day the Host Nation Got Fired). Snow Canons . . . I guess we could have used a few around here.

Snow is in the forecast for this morning, tho'. With 40mph wind . . . if we hadn't had 2/3rds of an inch of rain a couple days ago - maybe this would be a snirt storm. But, at least, we don't have to deal with "crud" snow this year.

Steve

Here is a link that might be useful: Types of Snow _ Wikipedia

Graupel is a German word for soft hail, very common there in spring. We ran into it as well yesterday, kinda fun.

I have two row covers out right now, a very light Remay over the potatoes and a heavier 1.5 oz over the spinach at night - the 1.5 oz is apparently a new retail product I bought at Nick's, my other heavy cover is getting a little torn after its second year. If it gets below, say, 26ºF I have an old sheet for the potatoes. I also sowed onions, shallots and greens yesterday that are under plexiglass for more heat on the soil - my old coldframe lids I saved and are using for this purpose, then I'll take apart in a couple weeks and re-cut and mount into new frames for coldframes for hardening off the veggies before going in the ground.

The Sunset is a very, very nice book and covers all Sunset zones from AK to the SoCal deserts. 1 page per veggie/herb/fruit and the more popular get more pages. Excellent fotos and clear diagrams and text. The BH used to be an Extension Agent and had that book been out then, it'd be the first or second off the shelf when answering questions. I think it would be a wonderful gift and the recipient will likely thank you for years. In CA nurseries, it used to be common to see Sunset Western Garden Books wandering around the nursery, with their owners in tow. The bible out there.

Dan

Graupel, huh? Never heard of it before, and can't promise to remember it (but I'll try!), since it's not too common around these parts. I always imagined it as "styrofoam pellets," and we even say "it's pelleting outside!"

We had that for about an hour last night (after a beautiful and sunny afternoon), and then this morning, 65 degrees when we dropped the kiddo off at school after her eye dr. appointment. Gee, we must be in Colorado, where we always say, "If you don't like the weather, just give it 15 minutes!"

Let me get my hat is right! I have to go back out and right a garden bench that's blown over. I've already had a round of loose pot gathering. It's not a good day for outside chores!
Barb

Windier than ever here today, and it's a chill wind, which I don't like much. Lots of stuff blowing down the street, too. Wheeee!

I've been working on caulking and weather-sealing my house this past week. While the winds have prevented me from working on the outside portion of my chore, it has helped me locate a few areas of air infiltration that I may have missed otherwise. I hope it lets up soon though, I need to do some stuff outdoors!!

Here is a link that might be useful: Tales of a Transplanted Gardener

We had our standard spring dust storm yesterday, but not as bas a previous years because the desert, I guess, had enough moisture keep it from getting worse. Some years, when you see it roll in from AZ, it looks like some massive thunderstorm on the way with black clouds of dust.

And I also got to do my annual "re-fasten the metal roof crown down" drill, where we hear the metal roof crown banging away in the wind, and you climb up hoping that some big gust won't come along and detach the whole thing, and put in longer screws. Why don't you do that in the fall, dummy?, you might ask. We do go along and tighten them down in the fall, but the heat/cold cycle in the winter loosens them all up again.

More wind today and tomorrow, down to 20º tonight.

We are having wind in the high teens with gusts to 25mph. It is snowing right now (may be graupel or just go straight to styrofoam).

This is a little better weather than yesterday and certainly better than Friday & Saturday. Tuff spring weather and it just seems like winter won't let go. . .

David, your roof story reminds me of working on the big glass greenhouses back in my youth. Surely, you can find a younger person to get up there and do that work.

During a windstorm, it seemed hard to decide whether it was safer inside the greenhouse or outside. Certainly, you'd want to be upwind of a large structure made of a single layer of GLASS!

Of course, they'd often lose glass and if it got very bad - out we'd go with roof ladders, caulking guns, and replacement glass. Whoa!! You never realize until times like those that you can hold on, not only with fingers and toes, but with knees, ankles, elbows, and wrists. All the while, pinning a loose piece of glass down with your forehead, nose and cheek . . .

I enjoyed something called "bouldering" during those days. It was just kind of a natural evolution from roof work. I mean, anything was more reasonable than climbing where your safety net was thin wood glazing bars and glass.

. . . malfunctioning autoimmunity put a stop to all that, before malfunctioning self-preservation did.

Steve

I hadn't heard of corn snow until I read this thread. I learned the term graupel when I read "The Children's Blizzard" a while back.

As I understand it, the difference between the two is that graupel falls as pellets, while corn snow develops when the snow that has already fallen partially thaws and refreezes (maybe multiple times).

Woke up to maybe 3/4" of snow on the ground. Currently winds in the 15 - 25 mph range, with gusts around 40 mph, and it's starting to snow again.

Spring, oh spring, where art thou?

More snow and wind? I empathize.

We got about 1/2 inch of numbingly cold rain instead; good thing I got my gardening work and grass-seeding done beforehand, as it's quite the muddy quagmire at the moment!

You know, I have a feeling this will be one of those year's where it switches from winter to summer, seemingly overnight. All of the sudden it will be 90º, and not a cloud in the sky for miles and miles, and we'll be saying, "Hey, what happened to spring, wasn't there just snow on the ground the other day?"

digit,
When I lived in west Texas, I worked for a florist. We had a very old glass g reenhouse - until the tornado with the softball sized hail came through town that is... I helped clean up the greenhouse mess a little bit (I might have still the GH-person that year) until I decided that was just too scary a place to be. We were trying to take out the hanging shards of glass but I watch one too many fall point-down from the ceiling and that was enough for me.

I have a feeling this will be one of those year's where it switches from winter to summer, seemingly overnight.

Mee too. That's how I'm conducting my gardening affairs this year.

Dan

Right now, it's 33ºF outside with 20 mph winds out of the north, supposed to strengthen as the day goes by and switch directions.

I doubt much gardening will take place today.

I sure hope we don't have a repeat of last June, when it stayed cool and cloudy most of the time. Great for the alliums, not so great for everything else.

And today it's warm and gorgeous and should stay so through the weekend. And that last snow brought both grass and weeds just popping out of the ground. It looks like I need to get out and mow already.