Our weather has been fairly warm with a lot of sunshine lately. We feel like spring is here. However, we still see signs that we have a ways to go yet. Our summer water system is still too frozen to begin collecting water for the coming season. The little freezing we’ve experienced in the winter system, amazingly limited to a monitoring pipe, only recently loosened up enough to be useful again.
This all seemed strange, until I joined Michelle in the garden for some heavy work yesterday.Michelle has built some new raised beds. To fit them in, we needed to dig out a section of rotten log. She also wanted to remove the usable soil that would be under the bed, so we went to work with a mattock and shovels. On almost every strike of the mattock, I pulled up chunks of icy wood or soil. The long winter freezes sank deep, and have lingered through the warmer weather.
Significantly, this is all just above the beach. The rocks below the garden warm in the sun each day, and presumably transfer some of that heat into the soil bank behind it. If ice remains there, it must be even more tenacious up in the forest, around the water intakes. We’ll just have to be patient.