Nine lambs were born here over eleven days this month. Four sets of twins and an only child lamb.
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| Beginning constructing a hillside hot tub. |
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| Clawfoot tub nestled in a small deck on a rocky hillside |
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| Left the sprinklers on in the sheep field over a freezing night |
Those silly images above were shot the morning after I left the sprinklers on in the sheep field during a freezing night. Two-foot long ice-cycles hung from bent cedar elm and live oak branches. Grass blades and cactus pads glistened under half an inch of ice, while all around them sun shone on green grass. The juxtaposition was almost absurd.
A stranger walking upon this field would stop and wonder at the existence of such a micro-climate.
And that's been the meditation all week. Small differences in temperature and humidity from one small place to the next.
When one is a child, he learns in about one summer day's time that sleeping on the bottom mattress of a bunk bed in a poorly air conditioned home could be more comfortable than sweating sleepless on the top bunk. That's microclimate. In the winter, he can appreciate the microclimate of that drafty space near the kitchen door on the north side of the house. And if it were his chore to water the potted plants on the porch, he might soon drag them to the shadiest area under the leakiest stretch of gutter. That's microclimate.
We see microclimates on the sides of highways where grass grows greener and thicker because of runoff and the heat retention properties of pavement. Below is a small example of this principle at work beside the stone wall up near the house, where winter buffalo grass prefers the warm re-radiation created by stacked pieces of limestone. The wall also changes wind current and temperature flow as cold air falls off the hillside behind us. This is, of course, similar to the way slower, shallower waters of the Creek warm up faster under mid-day sun and freeze faster in the winter (or, rather, the once-every-dozen-years winter for us).
The light, sandy soil of the old garden area is prone to overheating in the summer afternoon and overcooling on a winter night. A higher concentration of clay in the soil's composition would improve matters by moderating these temperature swings. But sand is what we got in the 2007 rain of nineteen inches that one night. Hamilton Creek rose fast and high, but where the old garden is, the flood waters were only high. Not fast. And that meant sediment deposition and lots of it. So the inside curve-deposition of a stream with bends will end up creating innumerable microclimates based on the presence of steep banks vs. sandbars; vegetation vs. no vegetation; etc.
And just as water flows downhill, so does heavier cold air. And nothing lies between that old sandy garden and the limestone cliff at the bottom of the hill behind the house. On a still winter night, cold air flows relatively unimpeded down onto this garden, while a hundred yards away near our new gardens, the same cold air bumps into too much vegetation. And because the new gardens are closer up against the wooded slope of the hillside, there's too much diversion of strong winds for that ever to be as much of a problem for the plants as it is in the old garden sitting more out in the open. Additionally, all that tree-growth above the new gardens has created with its yearly leaf-fall a completely different soil, one that is dark and rich with humus. (The higher organic composition also means more nitrogen and more acid, something the old garden is deplete of.) Variety.
We'll see an easy three to five degree temperature difference between the bottom of the hill and the top of the hill. If we were in San Francisco, we could take advantage of an app that lets its folks locate the city's various microclimates. http://www.sfclimates.com/
Ah yes, and The Creek. All of the above would be quite impossible were it not for some of its water pumped up into fields and gardens.
