Snow that doesn't last

When we woke up this morning there was the better part of an inch of slushy snow on the ground.  Now it's almost noon and the ground is clear.  This morning at around 10:00, I went out and took a few pictures and walked around.

 Checking into the greenhouse I noticed a few things.  First, it's flooded again.  Most of the ground is fine, but in a few places you can see how high the water is up.  For instance, the garlic buckets are floating in their pit.

This is no big deal really.  The blue bucket will be on its side when it settles, but they're all floating rather than filled with water.  There are a few heads in the water, floating, but I can't imagine how this might hurt them.

 

The empty potato barrel is floating a few inches out of it's hole.  I think I'm done with it and I should pull it out soon anyway.   In warmer weather I'll probably use it as a watering cistern.  Meanwhile, the potatoes aren't looking that great.  Between being flooded and (worse) being left with too little protection when it got cold the night after I pulled them out of the barrel, the sprouts are dying back badly.  I do see new sprouts starting to form though, so I think they'll still be okay as seed potatoes, as long as I treat them reasonably from here on out.

I saw one potato that had made its way into one of the cold frames and had a chunk out of it.  I have more than mice in there.  I think I need to install the cold frames with soil a few inches deep around them.  You can see, just behind the potato, that there's a foundation cedar post holding up the back edge of the cold frame.  That makes it very easy for things to get in and out.

The reason that the greenhouse is flooding should have been obvious to me.  I had put a drain pipe along the north wall when I installed the foundation insulation back there, but sometime last summer I filled in the ditch that leads away with a few shovels of soil, because in the heat of the summer, I want to be able to water by flooding the place a little.  When I run the irrigation pump, I have four 1" lines running.  I just run a line and an emitter hose in there and let it get good and soaked.  But I didn't dig the ditch back out in the fall like I should have.

A little work with the mattock and it was flowing.  This is the northeast corner, and the ground I had to dig through was frozen, but I could still hack through it little by little, spraying myself with some ice water and frozen dirt clods.  I'll dig it deeper later.

Elsewhere, the snow stuck longest on top of the plastic in section 14, and within that, it stuck longest on the west where the soil is somewhat hilled and the plastic has the least ground contact.  But it still melted.  In one spot I could see the soil (expansive clay, after all) cracking slightly as it thaws and dries.  The rest of the yard, garden, driveway, etc, is pretty sloppy. 

As I walked around, I checked section 6, which is planted with daffodils.  If I want the early market, I should spread plastic over that area too.