Cold Then Hot

Here we are not even five days since it was 2° here and it was 73° yesterday and that’s supposed to be the high today too.

Last night Vince said he was hot. I was so glad because I was about to sweat but figured he was cold so I hadn’t said anything. He got up and turned the fan on. It wasn’t long before I said to myself . . I’m turning the air conditioner on! I had my iPad on the bedside table and was able to turn the air on without having to get out of bed and have him figure out that I had the a/c on.  I was kinda laughing as I was thinking during the day, it was 71° warmer than it had been one night earlier in the week. That’s a big difference.

Yesterday Vince worked in the garden, cleaning out the asparagus beds. I planted a few more tomato seeds in the greenhouse. The tomatoes have had a rough winter and I’m not sure how good any of them are going to be to transplant in the garden. The greenhouse heater didn’t keep them quite warm enough during those really cold nights.

Someone had asked the other day about how cold it can get in the greenhouse and the heater we have will still keep the greenhouse warm. A lot depends on how hot it was during the day. I think if we have a really sunny day, the rocks in the greenhouse heat up and keep it warmer. On really sunny days, if the temp drops as low as 29°, I can get by without using the heat. I have an alarm in the house that tells me if the temp inside is dropping below 30° in the greenhouse but that means I have to get up and go tromping out there in the middle of the night by myself . . and that usually doesn’t happen.

Last year we lined the inside of the greenhouse with bubble wrap as insulation and it never got cold but this year, we just never got around to doing that and it did get cold.

On the night that it dropped down to 2°, it had been a cloudy day so the greenhouse had not been warm when it got dark and the heater did a fair job but there was still some damage to the tomatoes. The cucumbers totally bit the dust. The citrus trees, surprisingly, still look ok.

The greenhouse is kinda like everything else in life . . you can prepare for some things but probably not everything. A 2° night in this part of the country is pretty weird. About the only thing I could do for those kinds of lows would be to buy a second propane heater and stick it at the opposite end of the greenhouse. The heater is expensive (I think it was about $700) and the propane is expensive (I’ll use about $500 worth of propane in the greenhouse this winter and a second heater going would probably bump that up to about $700  . . for a few tomato plants, a few citrus trees and my lettuce. At some point . . it just isn’t worth it. Last winter, we really had no cold and we never know about the weather.

I still have time to get decent size tomato plants going before I transplant them into the garden and just have to hope we don’t have those extreme lows again. Seeds are cheap .. propane is not!