Typical day in the neighborhood

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:52:34 +0000

I just want to show some photos of Saturday around my house. A Saturday in JUNE, when I had the pleasure of documenting snow, rain, hail and sunshine over a period of about sixteen hours or so.

Very early Saturday morning, we started out with a light sprinkle of wet, cold snow.

The morning brought some gray, windy rain.

Which segued into a lovely hail.

Eventually some sunshine broke through and melted some of the hail, except the stuff in shade – along the fence.

Aaaand we ended with some more Rain? Sleet? I wasn’t going out there to check.

And that’s just one day, in one neighborhood. The thing with Calgary is, each area has its own microclimate, and it’s not at all unusual for the north end to get a hailstorm while the west gets some snow, and the south has a beautiful sunny day. Or the other way around. But above photos are proof that me starting a garden THIS YEAR is clearly very funny for someone upstairs.

Dear Calgary weather – you’re no fun.

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:48:24 +0000

Don’t let the pretty photos mislead you. While days climb to around 20-23 degrees (68-73F) the nights drop treacherously to 0 or -1C EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. Which means that unless I rig up an elaborate plant protection system involving blankets, towels, plastic AND get up early to uncover them AND tuck them in every night, my veggies will die. So right now they are still languishing in my lit-up office. They all seem fine – drinking lots, but healthy otherwise, but I sure do wish Calgary weather would stop being ignorant and at least give me some hope of setting out plants before July.

Daffodil

In the meantime all I can do is come home every night, weed my lawn, look at the pretty flowers and sigh.

Some kind of tulip

Typical tulips

Mystery flowers

However, there is some joy on the horizon – in the raised bed we did plant some radishes, peas and carrots. All veggies that don’t mind a cooler start – that are hardy in gardening parlance. And we waited and waited and waited – about ten days or so. But now we have little baby radishes which came up first, just like the books said they would. The peas are barely starting to unfurl little stalks, but are barely breaking the surface of the earth.

Baby radishes

So it’s all a bit of a waiting game – either the weather will warm up like it supposed to, or this weekend will be an engineering 101 project in my backyard.

Life in Cowtown » weather

Typical day in the neighborhood

Dear Calgary weather – you’re no fun.