Welcome to the Winter Garden

Here is what's going on in the Winter Garden, that is, my living room. (I live in a bachelor suite, so my "living room" is also my bedroom, music room, office, kitchen to the extent that there is no wall between the two, and tropical plant conservatory.)

• Planter #8: one Passiflora edulis that survived my complete lack of effort and some overwatering over the summer. Also there are some seed pods I harvested off an unidentified yellow-flowering plant in someone else's yard, and an avocado pit that I've buried in there, but I'm gonna dig it up because it's probably just rotting instead of sprouting.



• Planter #9: the oriental lily, having now shed all its leaves and been cut back to the ground; the alleged "blue" geranium, still alive, still not blue; and two or three globe thistles, one of which is putting forth some new growth. I don't expect much from any of these, but that's no big deal. I'll get more globe thistle seeds in the spring, and the other two never meant much to me.



• Planter #10: two pear trees.



• Planter #11: the Hope lemon tree, beautiful as always though currently dropping leaves. I gave them 6 L each of water around October 13, when they seemed to be finally thirsty, and as a result they are again showing signs of being over-watered. In addition, they are getting no light lately, October being a particularly bad month for sunlight. People think we lack light in winter; in reality, the real winter months have lots of beautiful sunny days, but while the lake is open in October and November, we get mostly overcast skies and precipitation. It's depressing for people, and makes lemon trees pale and sad.



• Planter #12: the Faith lemon tree, again showing its strength compared to Hope by not complaining so much about the circumstances. On the other hand, and I'll tell you more in a later post, Faith has the problem of very poor branching habits so far, so that I have the choice of pruning almost everything off or letting it go on with really crowded branches until a path suggests itself.



• Planter #13: two pear trees.



• Planter #18: baobabs and lychees. This planter is now in a dark corner against the heat register, after I read a post on a gardening forum from someone who couldn't get his kaffir lemons to sprout until he built them an incubator and raised the temperature to 35 C. That reminded me that my original baobabs were sprouted in June, so in warm weather, and my lemons were sprouted by leaving them against the heat register for a month. So I hie the planter thence, and sure enough, now I have a digitata sprouting. Perhaps even two digitatas, as I planted the dried-out (I thought) seeds from the previous attempt, and I seem to be seeing two roots. However, time will tell. At least one za seed is not sprouted yet; I know because I removed some surface mold with a fork and found it, the mold, had reached the seed. So I washed off the seed, which seems healthy though not cracking yet, and replanted it. As for the lychee, I'm not touching it. I can see its shiny carapace, so I know it hasn't rotted yet, and there is no point in disturbing it yet again.



• Planter #19: Deng Xiaoping



• Planter #20: the peony, which is of a variety called "Shirley Temple". I don't like that name, but the catalog photo was pretty. This afternoon I decided to make sure I had the planting depth right, so I dug it up, measured 1 3/4 inch up each stalk, tied a string marker there, replanted it so the dirt came up to the string, and then removed the strings. We construction workers like this sort of simple-minded trick. So now the peony is also by the heat register, awaiting its fate.



• Planter #21: the Asiatic lily / grotesque carnivorous alien bulbs. This one is in the kitchen right now, but I might move it to the heat corner... later. If the fancy takes me. And if I get around to tidying up that corner, which was recently occupied by some sort of amorphous clutter.



• CryoVat: there are actually two cryovats going right now, one for cherry pits which I plan to destratify in two weeks or so, and one with holly seeds which still have six weeks to go, and even so, I mentioned it before, can take "18 months to three years" to sprout. I'm not sure where I got the idea that I want to be challenged by my garden, but apparently, that's the path I'm taking.

Meanwhile, on the balcony:

• Outdoor CryoVat: Planter #17 is out on the balcony with dogwood and cotoneaster seeds. Like I said before, I figure that since it worked for the maydays, it should work equally well for anything I harvest around town. Meanwhile it's also contributing to my heat reservoir, if only a little.



• In the Winter Hut: the Jungle, with bulbs of tulips, daffodils, and stuff I don't remember the name of which is welcome to die; and also hollyhocks and flax from this year, which I hope will live to fight another year. Also, Liu Shao-ch'i and Peng Dehuai, which I really really really hope will make it. Inshallah.

So now you know.

Burlap: not just for prophets anymore

Here's the thing about winter. Mathematically, if you're a plant, winter is a semi-infinite cold reservoir and a semi-infinite heat reservoir, with 4 or 5 feet of snow in between. The cold reservoir is also very dry, whereas the heat reservoir is hopefully saturated with water; thus the snow not only slows down heat transfer but also prevents loss of water from the heat reservoir. And it's very important for frozen roots to be wet. Dry roots are much more damaged by freezing than wet roots.

Now on a windy seventh-floor concrete balcony, winter is a very small, finite heat reservoir surrounded by an infinite cold reservoir, with just a thin layer of plastic over most of the boundary, except at the top, where the two actually come into contact. If I'm lucky I might get 2" of snow from time to time on the balcony, but it blows away easily.

The problem, therefore, which I tackled last Sunday, is to convert a minuscule uninsulated heat reservoir into a semi-infinite, well insulated heat reservoir.

Hmmmmm...


Step 1: build a heat wall. That garbage can contain 98 L of soil, mostly reclaimed from decommissioned planters. And the burlap bags are a handy acquisition from the hardware store. According to the label, you're supposed to fill them with garden debris, and then soak them with water and leave them out in the yard over the winter, and in the spring you'd have compost. This seems unlikely to happen on my balcony, but certainly the garden debris can hold heat. And as it gets colder, I can progressively saturate them with water, which is an excellent insulant and heat reservoir. So here we see the heat wall, interposed between the cold reservoir and where the plants are gonna be.


Step 2: insulate concrete. Concrete is a great heat reservoir and a very poor insulant. In summer it gets very hot and burns plants, in winter it gets very cold and sucks the heat out of them. So here we have 2" of rigid insulation between the concrete and the planters. Notice that the pansies were still very much alive, this being October 23.


Step 3: profit. I mean, plants. Here you can see the Jungle, cleaned up a great deal, Liu Shao-ch'i in the foreground, and if you look carefully, you can find Peng Dehuai sticking up behind the Jungle. All these are saturated with water, of course. The last thing you want, like I just said, is to freeze your plants when they're dry.


Step 4: build a box. One layer of cardboard has very little R-value, but it will give the whole construct a shape in Step 5.


Step 5: batts. Every construction worker's least favourite insulant. I scored these, as I mentioned before, from a hardware store that was closing for renos and was trying to get rid of every last thing on the lot. So they gave me this big "damaged" bag of sound insulation for $10. Except only the outside was damaged; the batts are just fine. If you're going to insulate your garden with batts, though, here are four things to bear in mind.

1) Batts are not heat reservoirs. They slow the flow of heat, but they don't store heat themselves, therefore, they are not altogether a substitute for soil and snow.

2) Don't squish batts. Their insulating value depends to a great extent on the air they contain. If you squish them, they lose their effectiveness.

3) Wear a N-95 mask, available for cheap from your hardware store, while handling batts. If you think the mask is uncomfortable, you're gonna like having fiberglass dust in your throat even less.

4) After handling batts, have a cold shower and don't rub your skin. The fiberglass dust is very itchy. If you wash in hot water, it will open your pores and be even more uncomfortable, and the more you rub, the more you're rubbing it into your skin.



Step 6: make a burlap tepee. I can't guarantee that this step contributes anything to the survival of my plants, but in my opinion, it gives them some breathing room instead of smothering them with batts. Beside, having bits of fiberglass insulation in your flowerbeds is really unsightly; the burlap makes cleanup easier.


Step 7: more batts. Don't let the picture fool you, however. It looks like I'm putting tons of batts on top and few around the containers; in reality the container is the most important thing to insulate. You're trying to protect the roots, not the leaves.


Step 8: tarp. I was hoping to get an insulated tarp, but the hardware store had none, and given the price of the regular ones, I don't think I'd have paid for an insulated one anyway. The tarp of course provides very little R-value, but it has several other functions: 1) as a wind break; 2) to prevent water loss; 3) to absorb heat from the sun; 4) to keep precipitation off the cardboard; 5) to hold the whole thing together; and 6) to make it visually acceptable. Given that this particular tarp is 10' x 14' and my balcony is somewhat less than 5' x 10', you may be wondering how I managed to unfold and apply the tarp. Well, I'm a construction worker. One of the greatest skills of a construction worker is the ability to persevere when things are very awkward. What's much more amazing is that I managed the whole thing without swearing a single time, since it was Sunday and I try not to swear on the Sabbath.


And now the bigger questions. Is this enough? Is it too much? And how do I get back into my apartment?

As to the first and second, we'll find out in April if anything is still alive. And as to the third, again, I'm a construction worker; I can do these things. The point of building this whole contraption right in front of my picture window was to take advantage of the huge heat loss from said window, as well as get as much of the limited winter daylight as possible. But other than making access and egress difficult, it also blocked said limited winter daylight from getting into the apartment, where the dog and the non-hardy plants like to bask in it. So two hours later, though I had already showered and put on my pjs and it was getting dark, I went back out there and relocated the whole thing six feet away, where it's not blocking the window. It can still get some of the heat from both the picture window and the kitchen window, and some small amount of sun. Hopefully that won't be the difference between life and death.

I must say, I'm quite pleased with it so far. Granted I have no idea whether my plants are alive or dead inside, but it gives me the impression of having a live garden out there, it brought some closure to the summer garden season, and it keeps the place much tidier than having a bunch of planters full of dead things scattered all over the balcony.

The next day, it snowed.

Thus ends, therefore, the 2011 Summer Garden. Thanks for joining me, and stay tuned for the admittedly much mellower adventures of the Winter Garden, and the upcoming 2012 Summer Garden.

My troubles are over!

Obviously not, since I'm still alive. And still not at work, either. Money would solve quite a few troubles.

However, should I ever go to work and have money, I've found a planter that will solve most of my gardening problems. It's 39 1/4 by 39 1/4 by 16 inches. That's huge. It's 60% of the surface area of all my planters combined, and more volume than I have right now. And because it's just one planter, it wastes a lot less space than making up the same area out of a collection of small planters, and, perhaps even more importantly, it's gonna be way easier to winterize. (One of these days I'll write a post about the physics of winterizing planters, but I'm lazy.) AND it's self-watering!

The things I could do with such a planter... I could plant the 106 tulips and the 118 asters, and then some. I'd put my collection of nemophilas along the front, as they're heavy drinkers and the window boxes don't really suit them. Or maybe my collection of pansies. And I could put my collection of morning glories along the back, with a big trellis for them to climb, creating an even more gigantic Wall of Insanity. I could put peonies in there. Or pumpkins. Peonies and pumpkins. It would be the New Jungle, except it's five times the size of the old Jungle. It would rock like no container has ever rocked before.

The things I could do, if only the Prairies hadn't had a wet spring...

You know what I was thinking?

Obviously not, since I haven't told you yet.

First of all, since I've been hatching the concept of the hot box, which is all summer, I have entertained the possibility of using a heating pad or heating tape. If I put it on a timer so it doesn't run all day, there should be a way to maintain a safe temperature inside the box without running up a massive power bill.

But the new thought that occurred to me this evening is that my balcony should be a warmer zone than most gardens in town. First, it gets north-east to south-east winds, which aren't the most common. I should check the almanac to make sure, but I'm pretty sure we get more wind from the north and north-west, and I'm sheltered from those. And second, I have the kitchen window and the picture window looking out on the balcony, and the way this place is built, the heat loss from these two windows in winter is absolutely grotesque. The landlord's loss, however, could be my garden's gain. I can make a windbreak and put the less hardy plants in front of the picture window, where it's warmest.

If I can gain five degrees compared to unprotected locations, then I'm no longer zone 2 but zone 3. Can I? I have absolutely no idea. But if I can, most of my trees would no longer be at risk. And even if I can't, the heat gain in front of the window plus a hot box should be enough for the zone 4 plants, even though they'd be a little challenged. And with that plus heating tape, I might be able to winter the zone 5 plants.

Clearly, this will take some experimentation, and the first thing I should do is mount a thermometer out there so I can measure the heat gain objectively.

Of course this all sounds like a great idea right now when I have a migraine. I hope it's not completely ridiculous tomorrow when I will hopefully feel better.

Things you didn't know about physics

Actually, I don't know about you, but I've literally forgotten more about physics than most people will ever know, insofar that I've forgotten pretty much everything I ever knew. And I used to know... some.

So here is the thing with the winter preparation. We posit that my trees are gonna be hardy to zone 5 and I will leave them outside until the end of December. This means that they're allowed to drop to -30 C over three months. Therefore, how much insulation do they need?

The answer, in reality, would be complicated, because the temperature outside the insulation will drop gradually. But let's assume the outside temperature is -30 C the whole time. Then, we need to know how much energy is in the pots to begin with, which if I recall correctly, would be something like heat capacity times volume times temperature. I'll have to google it, but it sounds about right. We assume the starting temperature is 0 C, and then this would give us something in Joules. Then we divide it by the 7.8 million seconds the trees have to survive the cold, and that would give us something in Watts. From there we get the RSI, which is in units of K.m2/W. We have the Watts, we have the temperature difference (the K), and I determine the surface area. And an inch of rigid extruded polystyrene has an RSI of 0.88.

Therefore, in the unlikely event that I'm not mistaken, the answer would be:

Inches of rigid = (30 K) (2.23 m2) (7.8 x 10^6 s) / (heat capacity of soil) / (3.1 x 10^-2 m3 of soil) / (273 K) / (0.88 K.m2.s/J)

Anyone want to check the units? I don't feel like it just this instant.

Oh, fine, I'll do it. What are the units of heat capacity? J / m3 / K? I don't remember. But other than that:

K x m2 x s x m-3 x K-1 x K-1 x m-2 x s-1 x J x m3 x J-1 x K

K's cancel out.
s's cancel out.
m's cancel out.
J's cancel out.

Yep, looks about right.

Now I don't even have a preliminary guess on the heat capacity of soil, but seeing that there is a multiplier of a million in there, I'm gonna have to hope that it's a really huge number.

In the quite plausible event that I can't insulate enough to achieve this temperature curve, I can compensate by filling the hot box with ice.

That's right, ice. Why would I fill my hot box with ice? Because it has a high heat capacity, therefore, it's gonna be a reservoir of heat. If we start with more heat inside, we can afford to lose more of it. Ice usually comes out of the freezer at a temperature of approximately -18 C, but I could heat it up to near zero before putting it in the box. Even better, I could fill the hot box with water, but then, first of all I'd have to make my hot box waterproof, and second I'd have to allow for the expansion of the water as it slowly freezes over three months. The much bigger problem I'd then have is how to break my pots out of the ice, so that a) I don't have to try and drag a huge block of ice into the house, and b) I don't have a huge block of ice melting in my house. Maybe I need a box within a box.

Who knew gardening was so complicated?