Remember yesterday I told you how thrilled we all are here in farm country that we are getting our first winter storm in mid-November? Well, Mother Nature has a funny way of turning the tables. Just a few hours ago we were looking out toward the Coast Range and cheering the rain clouds skidding over the mountain tops. Then the windstorm behind those clouds kicked in. It seems to have blown all our rain clouds out East towards Tahoe. We were left with gusts up to 50 MPH and clear skies. The better to see all the flying branches and debris. Where the vineyards around here were covered with lovely yellow leaves, now they are stripped bare by the wind and those leaves are swirling around in mini-cyclones. Our windstorm has already taken out a few trees, and the winds are expected to last all night and through to mid-morning Friday. As of this afternoon, we’d already had some trees down. Including a willow along the mini-waterfall above Lake Charles. That was fun to take out as it had been sitting in a nice soupy swamp of mud from our latest rain.
Just look how fun farm work can be. Sometimes you get to dig stumps out of a marsh.
Hey, it’s loads of fun! See, DJ’s smiling.
Pat wasn’t so sure once the cold blew in. Hey, Pat! As our First Nation representative, shouldn’t you be at one with the environment?
Once it got dark, the wind really picked up — downing power lines and blowing out a large plate glass window in a restaurant in town. It’s too dark to see what state the ranch is in, but driving back in from town, the road was littered with branches and leaves. As I pulled in the gate, I thought I saw the plastic covering the guys had carefully put over a dirt pile go sailing away out across the pasture. Now I’m hunkering down in the living loft in the barn listening to the wind howling. Tomorrow is sure going to be interesting.
Glad everyone is safe after such a wind storm! We had Hurricane Sandy last year and the trees took such a beating. No power for 7 days, so I hope you kept your power. Good luck with the clean up this weekend, hope you get good weather for it!
So glad the losses are minimal thus far. Keep the hatches battened down and the Thundershirts handy! I’m relieved you have good help up there.
Winnie, this was nothing compared to Sandy. Just huge gusts of wind every two minutes or so. And weird little mini tornadoes that blew threw every now and then and pulled all the straw from the pasture or all the vineyard leaves up into a funnel cloud.
We’ve had huge white plastic bags blowing around our neighborhood in the wind – like regular grocery bags X 10. Where do they come from? And why three or four rather than just one? Another windy mystery.
Sounds like our weather migrated south. We had 50 mph winds in the San Juans and that always means downed trees. We are headed there for Thanksgiving and hope we haven’t lost any this time. These are tall, tough old evergreens but when we lose one, we’re always amazed at how shallow a lot of the root balls are. Kind of scary, as we never know which trees are just weakened. Hope your losses are minimal, and watch out for the widowmakers!
Zoomie, people like us are to blame for the large plastic. If you are doing a construction project and you have a dirt pile or an area of disrupted earth, the county makes you cover it to prevent erosion. If you are done with the area, you put coir matte (coconut matting) over it and seed it. If you are still using the pile for various things, you cover it with large sheets of plastic weighed down with planks and stones. But a storm like this week’s comes by and just shreds off large sheets of it.