Preparing for the Cold Weather

 “Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north.” 

                       Job 37:9

I believe with my whole heart that the Bible is inerrant, factual, and inspired by God.  I found a tidbit of truth this morning I put above.  Isn't that true?  In the last six months, we've had TWO whirlwinds (Hurricanes Laura and Delta) from out of the south and now we have icy cold coming out of the north.  Being southerners, we're prepared for hurricanes.  Winter ice storms?  Not so much.

We started preparing the best we know how, wrapping pipes, putting animals in the barn, installing heat lamps for the chickens, bringing potted plants indoors, and piling lots of firewood on the back patio.  This is one benefit I can think of of the hurricanes.  We now have more firewood than we can shake a stick at.  We'll burn it!

The next thing we began to do is harvesting the remainder of the oranges off of the navel orange tree.  Once we finished, we had about two 5 gallon buckets full.  We'll bring it inside and either eat it or make fresh squeezed orange juice.

One thing that concerns me is what the photo shows below.  Our orange trees were just about to bloom.  Temperatures could be down close to ten degrees.  We are not only worried about losing the blooms and thus, fruit for next year, but we're concerned about losing the trees!

We also picked the last grapefruit off the tree.  Our tree is young and only made 3 grapefruit this year.  We were rationing them and this is the last one.  We'll enjoy it, for sure.

Here are the blueberry bushes.  You'll notice the blooms are about to open on them.  Hmmm...  I pray we still have blueberries this spring!

Another good thing about hurricanes is that we have tarps.  Lots of blue tarps!!  I stretched them out over the plants (carrots, beets, brussel sprouts, spinach, lettuce, kale, kohlrabi, chard).  It may not save them, but it's the best we could do.

On this side, I covered the cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and onions.

Looking back toward the front of the garden, you can get an idea of just how much of the garden we were able to cover.  I hope it saves the vegetables.

After thinking about it, I made another last ditch effort to save some fruit trees by piling mulch deeply around the base of the plants.  I also put a couple of trash cans over the limbs of the grapefruit tree.

It will likely stay frozen from Sunday night through Wednesday.  Precipitation (sleet, ice, snow) is forecast for early this morning.  We rarely have weather as cold as this for this long.  We'll report back how we fared.  On the bright side, I DON'T HAVE TO DRIVE IN TO WORK TOMORROW!