Winter storms, saving seeds and new chickens

It’s been one heck of a May so far. Last Thursday we were nailed by a winter storm that dumped only ten inches of snow, but managed to pile into six foot drifts over the garden, yard and roads. We were out of power for four hours, causing me to melt snow to boil water to do the dishes and keep myself busy. Thankfully, our four hens that we brought home from our neighbor were snug in their chicken condo that Grant built.  It’s so solid that the 60 mph wind gusts didn’t budge it at all. And the weather didn’t stop with a snowstorm. The past couple of nights we’re been sharing the house with 23 flats of plants occupying every horizontal surface out of the boys’ reach because the temperatures are dipping down into the mid-20′s. I just can’t risk losing everything at this stage of the game.

Assignments are keeping me busy indoors. I toured the Ace Greenhouses in Ulm last Saturday with the kids’ gardening class, and finished an article for the Great Falls Tribune. Plus, I turned in my Montana Woman food column (about what to do with excess eggs, of course) on time and wrote my PlantersPlace.com blog entry about encouraging birds in the garden to eat insects. Now I have to work on one about saving seeds. It’s not as easy as choosing the best pepper or tomato; there’s a trick to ensuring you’ll have the same variety from one year to the next. Even though it’s too cold and wet to work in the garden (and the fact that snow covers half of it), at least I can write about it!