Tag: Spring snow in Portland

Garden Journal in April

Dear Liza,

It has been a weird spring of snow, sun, wind, hail, and rain. I have tried to reflect this in my garden journal.

This is my favorite two-page spread, with April 10 showing the garden as it was that day, and the dramatic change wrought by the overnight snowfall. As my accuracy improves, I am capturing the details better.

Illustrating transparent containers is hard, but they have been an important part of this spring’s garden, sheltering my sprouts from two inches of historic April snow. The bits of sunshine during the day allowed the soil to capture some heat.

And now that the freezing temperatures seem to be gone, we have rain and more rain. I am hoping for resilient sprouts and just a few peeks of sun for the next week.

Fingers crossed!

Love,

Grandma Judy

April Snow!!

Dear Liza,

I am going to take a break from telling about your visit to talk about our snow today. We woke up at 7:00 and saw this out our window:

Our beautiful, tall dogwood, which is almost ready to burst into bloom, was weighed down by more than an inch of snow. This is the first time Portland has had measurable snowfall in April…. in the 82 years the city has been keeping track of such things. This is historically nutsy weather!

While we were sitting on the couch doing French lessons, we heard a bang! bang! from outside and looked out, expecting the worst. But it was the best! Stacy from across the way had seen the problem and found a solution, a nice long 2 by 4. She whacked the tree trunk, the snow fell off, and the tree straightened right up. What a relief!

In other parts of the neighborhood, some trees weren’t as lucky. Many lost branches and this one lost its footing in the saturated soil and just leaned right over, landing on the car parked in the driveway.

Things were better in my vegetable garden. Yesterday, thanks to Auntie Bridgett’s help and a bunch of leftover plasticware, my young cucumbers, zucchinis, lettuces and pumpkins were shielded from the snow.

As of now, the ones we were able to cover have survived!

Of course, we are still in the middle of this weird spring storm. We are expecting more snow in the next day or two, and temperatures down near freezing. We put the covers back on and will have to wait and see and hope for warm sunshine soon.

Love,

Grandma Judy