The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

Preparing for the Storm

When a hurricane misses an area, there is always a collective sigh of relief.

When one actually pays a visit there is lots of extra work and some lessons to be learned.

Certainly Cape Carteret and the beaches of Emerald Isle  have survived many storms including Irene which is when I first started writing this article back in August 2010.   

The worst I saw from Irene  was the shed roof peeled off at Winberry’s produce. I know many in the area were ready for even more than the lengthy beating that Irene gave us. Still these pictures and the YouTube I share at end show that a storm like Irene is not to be ignored.

However, Florence, eight years later, was a different story.  Many people lost their homes from Florence.  We lost a few pieces of soffit and a few cardboard boxes that were on the floor of our garage. Over fifteen years Florence was the only storm to even put a few inches of water on our garage floor. Our house was seven feet above the garage floor. I say was because in 2021 we moved inland to be closer to our grandchildren.

Irene was our first serious hurricane in our first five years that my wife and I have lived along the Southern Outer Banks. While we had a hurricane emergency kit almost from day one on the coast, its evolution to something much more sophisticated had only begun when Irene came ashore near Cape Lookout on Saturday, August 27.

There was nothing magic in those early preparations for Irene, mostly we used common sense and listened to the experts some of whom had been on the shore for their whole lives.  By the time Florence hit on September 11, 2018, we were really prepared but even so we followed the mandatory evacuation orders. Most I talked who did not evacuate were sorry they didn’t.

This list is in not particular order does not replace common sense. I can tell you that hurricanes love to hit at night.  There is nothing scarier than being in the dark during a hurricane so the top of my list is light.

Over the years we gathered a couple of LED battery powered lanterns and a number of very compact LED flashlights. These emergency lights are the first level of defense to make sure the lack of power does not end up being any worse  than it is normally.  Over time we added power bricks for our phones, small rechargeable light.  After our move from the coast we got a rechargeable power station that will run both our refrigerator and Internet service.  Likely the power station is a response to us leaving our generator at the coast.

Part of additions to our emergency kit before we left the coast was a fancy emergency radio from Amazon. It can be powered with anything from a hand crank to solar.   It supplements our battery powered transistor radio.  Not surprisingly power outages happen even away from the coast.

Next on our important items  list are a couple of coolers- one big, one not so big.  It takes forty pounds of ice to completely fill both coolers. In the case of Irene, I loaded them with ice on Friday afternoon before Irene arrived. The automatic ice machine in Peletier had a large line so I drove across the bridge and got my ice in Emerald Isle just before they closed the bridge because of their evacuation order. That gave me a chance to go take a few pictures of the Bogue Inlet Pier as the first big waves were hitting it.

When the power started flickering on Saturday morning, we took items out of the refrigerator that we planned to use in the few meals and put them in the small cooler.  It is probably no surprise to those who know me, but even back in 2010 we kept a small emergency plastic container of Duke’s mayonnaise.

The big cooler stays closed as a reserve for ice. Even after over 48 hours it still had over 75% of its ice on Monday morning long after Irene.  We were lucky during Irene.  The power went off just before midnight and was off for less than four hours.

We always tried to cook some easy to prepare protein for sandwiches the day before a hurricane is schedule to visit. We also stock up on tuna fish, peanut butter, and bread to go with the canned soup, salmon, and chicken that is usually on hand. Paper plates and cups along with plastic utensils and a fresh box of large garbage bags make life a lot easier after a storm especially if the power is out for an extended period of time.

We have always installed our grills to get  fuel from the large propane tank that feeds our fireplace and other appliances. If the power stays out, you cook on the gas grill unless you run the generator which in our case allowed us to use our gas stove.  If you don’t have a gas grill, get something easier than a charcoal grill.   You can have storms that bring extended rain.  A single burner propane cooking stove can make life easier than trying to get a charcoal grill going.

In addition to food, a stockpile of water is critical. We try to keep at least two flats of bottled water on hand all the time. After Irene, we bought from Amazon a six gallon drinking-water-safe water container.  Whenever a storm was close enough to make us feel uncomfortable, we would fill a few one gallon jugs that we had around. We also bought a dozen small bottles of water in case we had to leave by car. We planned to have over ten gallons of water for the two of us. Filling our bathtub with water before a storm was another regular step. You might need water to flush toilets.   Keeping buckets ready to fill whenever a situation looks like it was going from bad to worse is important. In our later years at the coast, we even added some water purification tools and food safe bags that could be used with five gallon plastic buckets.

An important step in storm preparation is to secure any important personal papers- passports, birth certificates, papers for insurance, banks, and loans.  We have two quick-exit, emergency brief cases and a backpack that carries four laptops. We also have a camera bag for three cameras, various chargers and USB thumb drives/portable SSD drives.  The quick exit strategy also includes at least $400 in cash.

When Irene came, we had a freezer full of frozen homegrown tomatoes, and packed with meat. We decided to buy a Troy-Bilt generator. We got one from  Lowe’s well before the storm so there were still lots of choices.  We used our generator a little over three hours with Irene.  In the eleven years after that, it was never used for a power outage.  However, I had to start it at least twice a year and keep lots of ethanol-free fuel around for it.

With the generator, you need spare gas cans.  We ended up with three five gallon cans.  That gave us enough ethanol free gas  to run the generator sporadically for four or five days without siphoning gas from the boat or truck. Our generator performed perfectly. It always started on the first pull but I always turned the fuel shut off valve and ran the generator until there was no gas in the carburetor to create a mess.  I also used fuel stabilizer.

For the Irene emergency, I wired a couple of circuits so that we had the refrigerator, lights, coffee, and a toaster oven.  Well before hurricane Florence arrived, we had installed a proper external plug for the generator and the proper switch with lock out to go from the power grid to the generator.  We could have had emergency electricity for a long time with just the boat gas.  I eventually added a battery powered pump that would have allowed me to easily access our boat’s gas.

Make no mistake, a generator is a lot of work.  If it is going to get really bad, you are likely better off getting out of town.  When it does get really bad, you might have power, but there are likely no other services including doctors.

We also kept a large rechargeable spotlight since we lived along the water, and it could be possible we needed to figure out how high the water had risen during the night.  Obviously we also stockpiled batteries of all sizes.

Our homes have probably always had  a little more than the normal first aid supplies that most homes have.  We lived on an isolated farm for ten years, it shaped our preparedness well before hurricanes. Being boaters we also had at our disposal  the emergency gear for our boat which included a larger first aid kit, flares, emergency marine radio, and emergency noise makers.

It is absolutely critical to not  forget to get cash from the ATMs while the power is there. When the first restaurants come back, sometimes they will only take cash.  It is important to check on your supply of medicines, fill your vehicles with gasoline, and make sure that all of your bills which might come due during the storm are paid ahead of time.

Actual preparations at the house involved bringing inside any items that might blow or float away and using bungee cords to secure heavy deck furniture to the deck railings.  You would be surprised what can float in a hurricane surge.

For us the final thing was to put our boat on storm footing. We had a side pole lift which doesn’t have the boat suspended from cables or slings. Our skiff sat on two metal arms. Sixteen years of experience, including Irene and Floyd demonstrated that our boat was safer on this kind of lift than on a trailer.

All our planning made us feel lots better but it never got bad enough for us to use all our gear.  Still I think it was well worth being thoroughly prepared for all the storms even if you like us end up leaving for a bad one like Florence. Solid preparations mean the next time around is usually a snap and if you are caught off guard, you still close to being prepared

You alway hope you don’t have to go on full alert status.  However, Mother Nature is truly unpredictable, so do whatever you have to do in order to stay safe which includes leaving when told to do so.

If you want to get a taste of the rains and winds that we experienced for hours, check out this YouTube video that I did during the height of Irene.  The only pictures I have of Florence are the aftermath which you can find in this post.  One last piece of advice, be cognizant of how the storm interacts with evacuation routes.  There are often times when flooding is worse inland than one the coast. More than one long time resident told me to watch the rivers if I evacuated because the window to get back to coast was often short.  Inland flooding often was much worse and lasted longer than coastal flooding.  We barely got back to the coast before the roads closed after Florence.

An Adventure Lived Well

Back in 2008, I wrote a post about what was our recent decision to move to Carteret County, North Carolina.  I likened moving to finding your mate. I said something to the effect that dating your mate is a little like visiting the place you want to move. I also suggested that just as you really do not get to know your life's partner until you get married, you never really understand a place until you move there.

Here we are in 2019, we have listed our home in Carteret County and are in our fourteenth year living on the Crystal Coast. What can we say about life in Carteret County?  Was our leap of faith to move to the North Carolina coast a good decision?  What have we learned?

The first lesson is an easy one.  What is around your house is as important or more important than your house.  The particular setting of our home on Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River has spoiled us.  We have water in our backyard along with great egrets, great blue herons, osprey, otters, and other creatures.  When we were looking for a home on the water, we did not understand living on the water like we do now. This close connection to nature is the best since we left our farm in Canada in 1984. Life by the water has brought us many treasured moments.

The next lesson is a reinforcement of what we have seen in our other moves. The area where you move will have even more impact on your happiness than your actual neighbors. Carteret County has a reputation for good schools and reasonable growth. We have seen the benefits of the measured growth in our years here. The services available now are even more than we hoped for when we moved here. There was one drugstore when we came, there are now three.  Lowe's Home Improvement which came a year or so after our move is less than ten minutes from our home. Swansboro's nearly new Walmart is less than fifteen minutes. While the restaurants have changed, we still do not have to go far to enjoy a meal outside our home.  Just about anything else you could dream of except Costco is available in Jacksonville less than thirty minutes away or Morehead City about twenty minutes down the road. Had we moved to a less prosperous area, I think we would have been disappointed. We also do not mind visiting Wilmington once in a while to get a Costco fix.

The third lesson is to go for the things that are most important to you. Our new home on the water ended up a better fit for us than the similarly-priced old beach house four rows back that was our other choice. Both homes were close in price. Had we bought the beach house, it would have been easier to walk on the beach but much harder to boat or kayak. The beach house would have meant giving up not only the direct water access from our yard but also the water views that have so enriched our lives.  Being able to see the water from our home was high on our original list.

Lesson four, things that you do not think about can end up making a big difference. When we picked our new home, we never considered how nice it would be to have our own microclimate with a south-facing wall.  We also did not realize the way our house and the houses beside us were positioned would come to give us far more privacy than many of the new homes in the subdivision. We also no idea how wonderful it could be to have the swimming pool less than a five-minute walk so it would be easy for the grandchildren to come home when tired or go over after dinner for a quick dip. Finally, our location at the back of Raymond's Gut, a good distance off the river has turned out to be a good place to weather storms that visit the area.  We have never even had to take our boat off the lift even during Irene or Florence, the two most significant storms in our years here.

Lesson five, if you are going to do remodeling, go ahead and do it as soon as you can so you can enjoy it. We were able to add almost 1,000 square feet which included the nicest office for writing that I have ever had and a great room with amazing views of the water.  I am glad we did it early enough to use it and love what it brought to our home.

Carteret County turned out to be the right spot for us when we moved here.  We have come to know and love the area. If our grandchildren were here, we would not be moving. Everyone should have a list of what they want if they are planning on a move. Keep going over the list until you are certain of it.  When you are deciding on where to move, visit it during rainy and cold weather in addition to beautiful days. Imagine yourself living in the place that is at the top of your list. Ask questions of your realtor, but also ask questions of the people who might be your neighbors.

Moving is not easy but I am happy that Carteret County had a chance to find a way into our hearts. If you love the water, like a slow pace of life, enjoy roads that are rarely clogged with traffic, and want a place with unparalleled scenic beauty, visit Carteret County.  It might be the start of a love affair and a place that meets your needs for the next decade.

Living ten minutes from the beaches did not stop me from hiking all the beaches that my heart desired. I learned how to safely boat down here in the waters of the White Oak River and Bogue Sound with even a few adventures out into the Atlantic Ocean.  The White Oak River also became my personal kayaking paradise often delivering wonderful drum, trout, and flounder that we enjoyed fresh from the water. 

We had as friends and neighbors wonderful people, some with deep roots in Carteret County and others from places about as far from here as you can get and still be in the United States.  All things considered, the leap of faith was worth it.  Missing all the winter weather that used to keep us on our mountain in Roanoke, Virginia has been a real treat as was being able to garden twelve months out of the year.  I would have never guessed that I would end up liking Emerald Isle so much that I did an annually updated travel guide for six years.

 

A Gardening Update

Last fall I posted an article, Compost at the Coast. It was about changes to my composting system. I went through a winter with the system and I have made some adjustments. I found that my new rotating compost bins work best when given materials that have already started decomposing so I added a plastic garbage can. It actually doesn't need to be a full-sized garbage can but I went with full size because it was easiest to get. One third the size would be about right. When the weather gets cooler, I might cut it to that size.

I also added a smaller rectangular container to hold our organic waste when the barrel was in its composting mode. What ends up happening is that about two weeks worth of "nutrients" go into the barrel. Those nutrients are mixed and covered with the right amount of brown material to make certain that a proper carbon to nitrogen ratio is maintained for efficient composting. If you need more information on composting and keeping that ratio right, this page is a great resource.

At around three weeks, I empty my rotating barrels of compost and put them in the large square storage bin. I then shovel the decomposing material from the garbage barrel into the two rotating bins. I have learned that filling each rotating bin about one-third full works best. I close them up and give them a spin every few days.

Once my garbage barrel is empty, I pour what I have collected in my small container into the barrel. I thoroughly soak it and cover it with a one to two-inch layer of Daddy Pete's Raised Bed Mix. I like that particular brand and type because it has a little more of the woody material needed for good composting.

During the next week to ten days, I empty our nutrients collected from the kitchen directly into the barrel and add a little Raised Bed Mix every few days. Once or twice I will stir the materials with a shovel. After I have two weeks or so of rotting materials in the barrel, I cover it and soak it again. For the next week or ten days, nothing goes into the barrel.  All our nutrients go into the square container.

Then the cycle starts over again with the rotating bins being emptied and the materials from the garbage barrel being put in the rotating bins.

Maybe all of this sounds like a lot of work, but I can guarantee that good compost yields amazing results in the garden. Our sixteen feet of green bean trellis produced over fifteen pounds of beans. Our two small beds, one of them raised gave us over twenty-five heads of lettuce.  We ate the lettuce from the last of March until the last refrigerated head of Romaine was served in mid-June.  You can add spinach, spring onions, banana peppers, and tomatoes to our list of successful crops.  This year the garden also produced a monster cucumber plant which happens to be planted at the base of our compost storage bin.

Here is a link to a photo album of pictures which go from when the garden was planted in February to when we decided to give up on the remaining green beans and start preparing the soil for a fall crop.

Compost at the Coast

It was at least four or five years ago when my granddaughter found a library book that talked about compost. As she found out, the Crystal Coast has everything you need for compost: air, nutrients, heat, and moisture.  She was so interested that I helped her make a compost pile behind our house. It did not work very well because a raccoon stirred it up. I quickly developed a system that allowed us to compost without help from the local wildlife. It was a much smaller scale than when I used a 60HP four-wheel drive tractor to turn our composting cow manure at Tay Ridge Angus back in the late seventies, but the principles of making compost are the same.

I bought three large garbage cans, cut the bottoms out of them and staked them in place. I eventually added a scavenged storage bin for the finished compost. The tops of the garbage cans had holes drilled in them and I used weights and/or bungee cords to keep the critters out.

We dumped all our vegetable and paper waste except newspapers into the compost bins. Some garden waste also joined the household waste, but we were careful not to put tomato vines or any others that might be diseased into our bins.  Since we do not have a shredder/grinder, sticks and coarser items still went to the dump. I layered my bins either with hardwood mulch or inexpensive coarse soil which passes for topsoil. I also added some water to the bin and used a shovel to turn it occasionally. Once the bin was full I turned the contents upside down by shoveling it to the next bin.  Then I would start all over.  You have to keep the green succulent stuff to about one third the volume of what you put in the barrel.  We keep that ratio by using everything from coffee grounds and filters to used paper towels and woody mulch or topsoil with lots of mulch.

The material in the second bin would get stirred a little by shovel over the next month to six weeks. After that time its volume would be reduced by half. At that point, I would turn the contents upside down once again by shoveling it into my third garbage bin.  Once the third bin was full, I would shovel it into the square storage bin.  We figured out that we generate enough compostable materials to create about 8 cubic feet of compost every six to seven months.

We usually put our compost on the garden in the February to March period and again in the September to October timeframe.  If I have a surplus, I bag it in old bird seed bags and store it.

The system worked well but was very labor intensive and took up a lot of space.  We recently modernized with a dual chamber HotFrog rotating composter.  I went with the HotFrog because it did not have dozens of screws that might rust holding the bins together. The first batch has already come out but it is a little early to say how it will work during our relatively mild winters.  I am hopeful that we get the same great compost with a whole lot less work.

Here is a picture of our compost storage bin which should be done with its final cooking in the next four weeks or so. At that time we will empty it and start the process over.  This is the last of the three barrels that we used in the past.  We used it to transition to our new system. While you cannot feel the quality of soil from a picture, you can get an idea of the soil our continuous applications of compost have helped create by looking at soil just to the left of the Vinca in this photograph.

Find more links to information about the Crystal Coast at my CrystalCoast.me website.

An Abundant Coastal Spring Garden

The one positive thing about a cool spring is that it is great for growing certain vegetables like broccoli and lettuce.  Our gardening space is limited but we still found room for over thirty heads of lettuce.

With the recent Romaine lettuce scare, our organic, homegrown Romaine has gotten very popular. I can only eat lettuce two meals a day at best so we have given away a lot of lettuce.

Gardening on the coastal plain of North Carolina is different but can be very rewarding.  You have to work with the weather when you can and work around it when you cannot. The lettuce and broccoli pictured to the left were planted on February 10. We started eating lettuce the last week in March.  We usually get four good weeks of lettuce. This year it looks like we will have five weeks or more.

Our garden does well and I attribute a lot of our success to the compost that we make each year. If you look at the soil around our plants on February 10 when I planted them, you do not have to be a farmer to guess that it is very rich soil.  We have been working on it for years.  All vegetable and fruit trimmings, coffee grounds, eggshells, and discarded non-greasy paper products except for newspapers go into our compost bins.

My process is a very manual one of shoveling the compost from the first bin to one of three others. The material as it makes its way through the barrels rots.  I emptied my large square compost bin in late January and spread it onto my garden spots.  By end of summer, the bin will be ready to empty again as we start cleaning out beds.  The twice a year application of compost has made our soil a powerhouse.  The only plants that get a boost are my tomato plants which get some liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks during the summer.

Even with rich soil and great weather, our spring garden is winding down.  We will still be eating lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and onions for a while longer but if the heat comes quickly, the lettuce will also turn bitter fast. However, we already have tomatoes, peppers, and green beans growing as our summer crops.  While our tomatoes are not going to be ripe by that May 30 date like they often do, we should have tomatoes by end of the first week of June. A lot depends on the heat we get.  Our green beans will also come in during June. The green bean plants are about two inches high now.

All we have left to do for the summer garden is to stick in a cucumber plant and put in our second crop tomato plants which will provide us with tomatoes in late summer and fall. Sometimes we have enjoyed those tomatoes as late as December.  We will pull our green beans out in August and plant another crop of them in mid-September. If all goes well we will harvest them in early November. Once the heat is gone in the fall, usually after the middle of October, we will once again plant lettuce, onions, broccoli, and spinach.  Sometimes we plant kale for the winter.

It is not unusual for us to eat some of that fall lettuce in January and even into February. That did not happen this year as the extreme cold temperatures took out all of our fall plantings that had survived through December.

Every gardening year is different and it can be especially exciting in a place where it is sometimes possible to harvest crops twelve months out of the year. There is always a surprise in a garden.  The first of ours this year happened to be the strawberries that took over one of our beds.  We could have pulled them out but it was fun watching them grow and we have enjoyed having strawberries growing alongside our driveway. My wife even made a strawberry sonker out of the first part of our berry harvest. For those who did not grow up in Surry or Stokes County in North Carolina, this is a good article on sonkers.

 

 

Persistent Tomatoes Highlight Fall

While I have been absent from my soapbox for a while, one of my wagon train tomatoes continues to solider on into the fall of 2017.  My originial three wagon train tomatoes went into their pots about August 22, 2016.  They were amazingly productive in the spring of 2017. In early summer as the plants appeared to be finished, I cut their stems off just above the ground.

One plant had such a will to live that it sprouted new growth. My wife who always has a soft spot for a struggling plant took it under her care. In September, thirteen months after we planted it, we enjoyed a few nice tomatoes off of it.  All of our other tomatoes planted in the spring except for one were long gone. The picture of the green tomato was taken October 10, 2017 so it is likely we will enjoy another handful of tomatoes in November.

I am amazed that a tomato plant could last this long and continue to produce tasty tomatoes. While we had plenty of tomatoes this summer, it was not the bumper crop that we have enjoyed in previous years.  Many of our plants were felled by a disease that quickly killed them as they were approaching peak production.  We will try planting more tomatoes in pots next year. We planted tomatoes where our beans had grown for the last three years but it did not seem to help.

Aside from tomatoes, our spring and early summer garden was exceptional, lettuce, spring onions, spinach, beans, and cucumbers almost overwhelmed us.  Precipitation during the growing season was close to what we needed.  From January 1, through May 31, we recorded 18.45 inches. June brought 6.05 inches, July 6.20 inches, August a wet 9.27 inches, and September  6.90 inches.  So far October has been dry with only .55 inches in a couple of showers.

At this still summer-like point, our only fall crops are some hot peppers and cucumbers that refuse to give up and our second planting of green beans that should be ready to harvest in November.  With temperatures still in the eighties, it is still too hot for our fall lettuce, broccoli, and onions.  This year I do not plan to do another set of fall wagon train tomatoes but I will be starting a few plants in December and hopefully put them in our wagon in January or February.

The Crystal Coast remains a great place to garden, fish, and live.  If you are interested in visiting, fall is a great time.  The crowds are gone and soon the humidity will also disappear. If you need some guidance for your trip, try our book, A Week at the Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  For full details on our great summer visit this site.

Twelve Months of Crystal Coast Gardening

We have been through eleven winters along the Crystal Coast and ten of them have involved some gardening.  Three years ago I wrote about Gardening in December.  In those three years, I have worked hard at refining our winter gardening techniques.  One of our most successful ventures has been our Wagon Train Tomatoes.  The plants were put into planters on wagons around the third week in August. We hauled them in and out of the garage depending on the weather.  This year we have enjoyed tasty, ripe tomatoes in December, January, and February.  We will likely get a few in March just as we are putting our first 2017 plants in the ground.  Our late tomato crop has been amazing with more than enough to eat and plenty to share a few.  I picked another eight tomatoes on February 21.  Aside from our traveling tomatoes that go in and out of the garage as the weather changes, we have also managed to enjoy lettuce, kale, and rutabaga this winter.

Aside from some very cold weather on January 7-10, the winter of 2016-17 has been a mild one and since the first of the year, it has also been dry. We got over six inches of rain in December but only slightly over three inches of rain in January.  February has been even drier with only one and one half inches with one week left to go in the month.  We could actually use some rain which is not something we have said a lot in the last couple of years.

I got all of our beds ready for bad weather before the end of December.  The bad weather never came. We did pull some of our rutabagas with the approaching cold weather in early January and I put buckets over three over-wintering heads of lettuce and our Swiss Chard.  The 15F temperature was cold enough to melt our Swiss Chard and to damage some leaves on our kale.  I picked the damaged kale leaves off and we should enjoy some fresh kale before the beginning of March.  This last week of February has been so nice that I transplanted broccoli and Romain lettuce plants into our raised bed on February 20. Some radish seeds also went into the ground on the same day and I planted onion sets the next day.

My tomato seedlings are from two to four inches high so they are on track to go into the ground around the end of March unless this exceptional weather continues.  As much as I love this weather, you cannot fall in love with warm days in February because the cold winds of March will likely break your heart.  I have seen far too many late snow storms ruin an early spring than I care to remember.

The plants that I have put in the ground are a gamble, but I already have backup plants growing.  It is always challenging when you are trying to out guess mother nature.  If you wait too long, the weather can be too hot for lettuce, broccoli, and other cool weather plants. If you plant too early, your plants will go into suspended animation.  One year it was so wet that over half of my onion sets rotted.  I am only going to plant half of the bag onion sets that I have.  If they do well, great.  If not I will plant some new ones and hope for better luck.

It would be rare to have an early spring warm-up without some shots of cold March air. It also takes longer than most people imagine for our waters to get warm. Slowly warming water and cool spring winds protect us from early heat waves but keep our soils cool.

Once our tomato plants are in the ground around the end of March/early April, we will start thinking about planting our green beans, squash, and peppers.  Our second crop of green beans this year was severely damaged by Hurricane Matthew so we are hoping this early crop does well.

If you want to enjoy vegetable gardening, find yourself a home on the Crystal Coast.  Just make certain that it has a south-facing garage like our home so you can try some wagon train tomatoes.

The Pool is Empty

Most people think little about the weather but I long ago confessed to being a weather junkie so when it is hot, I think about how to share my experiences with the heat.  If nothing else, writing about the heat keeps me out of the heat.

It is the beginning of the second week in July and at the middle of the day, the neighborhood swimming pool is empty.  First let me say that the pool picture comes from the spring because it is too hot to walk over and take a new picture.  I could have taken a picture if I had thought of it during my early morning walk but I was busy with other thoughts.

Today's outside air temperature is almost identical to yesterday's but I can speculate on why there are no children at the pool today when there were several there yesterday.  My first guess would be that there is no air moving today.  Yesterday we had winds of 10-15 MPH.  At noon today with no breeze and with the temperature in the low to mid-nineties, congregating around the pool is a recipe for being cooked.  Unlike the morning hours when I took the picture in the post there is no shade from the trees so the heat can be brutal.  Also probably one afternoon of being cooked at the pool was enough to convince parents that maybe a movie in the heat of the days is okay once in a while.

I am reminded of winter when we get a hot spell on the Crystal Coast. The feeling of being trapped in the house by heat is reminiscent of being trapped during the cold weather that sometimes visits us.  Both the heat and cold rarely last for more than a few days except sometimes in August and in February respectively. I love the out of doors, but I will admit to both cold and heat draining my energy so I try to avoid both.

If you live along the southern coast of North Carolina, you will be no stranger to temperatures in the low-nineties and to humidity to match, but when the mid to upper nineties arrive, you either surrender some of your outdoor time or  you get very hot.  Our area will be back to normal by early next week and I already have a list of things that need to be done.  Fortunately mowing the yard is not one of them.  While I still mow some of our yard, I have happily retired from our big front yard which someone mows and trims for twenty dollars.  I mowed it far too many times during the heat of the day.  Sometimes a dry thread was hard to find on me.

My wife and I garden a lot and we actually plant part of our garden in the shade so that it will survive hot spells like this.  We have had tomatoes that would almost cook on the vine in the heat.  Still any garden requires some almost daily work.  This week our work has been done very early or almost at dark.  We have managed to take out our green beans which have finished their summer growth.  We will plant some more in about six weeks.  Not many places get to enjoy November green beans but we do.  The tomatoes and cucumbers will continue on for a while.

Even routine chores lose their fun when the heat gets in the mid-nineties.  I enjoy grilling out all year round and it is not unusual for me to cook something on the grill for lunch.  This week I grilled some turkey burgers for lunch.  I felt like I was partially cooked myself after I came inside after my time at the grill.  The slices of cheese were melting before I even got them to the burger. There are other challenges from the heat.  This time of year I have to remember to leave my camera in our garage.  If I do not, I end up spending the first five minutes wiping the fog off the lens. One of our cars is parked outside, so we try to put the windows down in the morning and put them up before bed.  When it rains, we have to be on our toes and put the windows up before the storm.

Cleaning your glasses or sunglasses after they fog up is another high-heat, high humidity ritual of the South.  We long ago switched to Tervis tumblers so we would not need coasters on every table. Another warm weather quirk is that usually on an extra hot day, we finish the day with slightly muted colors.  Even in the mornings on high heat days, we usually have stunning blue skies. 

As the evening is finishing today, a few children are gathering around the pool. It will not be long and I will try to get in thirty minutes of yard work before the sun sets.

The last two bits of trivia about hot days on the Crystal Coast both relate to water.  The first is getting a glass of water to drink.  In the summer when I get up in the night and have a drink of water from the tap in the bathroom, the water is warm.  By the same token when I get in the shower, I can turn the water to full cold and have no problems standing under the water.  Our water pipes are buried six to twelve inches deep.  The water we drink is freezing cold in the winter and warm in the summer.  Our pipes are not down far enough to keep them from the changes in the weather.  It is part of living on the coast.

My weather trivia if nothing else is a good way to learn about the Crystal Coast and its quirks.

 

 

Part of the Crystal Coast Magic

Morehead City Waterfront

I have written in our book, A Week At The Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide, that Swansboro just ten minutes by boat or fifteen by car from our house is a well-loved adopted child of the Crystal Coast.  No adoption papers need to be filed for Morehead City which is actually the working heart of the Crystal Coast.  We live a little farther away, about twenty miles west, from Morehead City, but a trip down to the city by the water with the heart of a fisherman is a regular occurrence for us.  It is easy to say that MHC as it is know locally is a big part of the magic that is the Southern Outer Banks.

Morehead City was actually my first introduction to the Crystal Coast that I can remember in detail. The earlier memories of beach trips here are a little fuzzy, but I can well remember one of my first trips on my own in the summer of 1969.  My uncle Austin rode with me down for a fishing trip in my strange green Bronco which always had a can of stop-leak and a coat hanger for repairs.  We crossed the bridge at Morehead City and four wheeled down the sandy beach and fished the Point at Emerald Isle.  We did not have a lot of luck but it was a wonderful trip and we brought back a cooler full of shrimp from the Sanitary fish market.

That was my only visit that summer as I gravitated to Ocracoke and made a few trips there to camp and even watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon from the Pony Island Motel.  Many years later when we were trying to figure out where to stick our feet in the sand, we made a trip to Ocracoke and quickly decided that as beautiful as the beaches were there that Ocracoke was not the home where we wanted to write the next chapter of our lives.

Now that I look back on it, Morehead City was a big part of the reason that we decided to move to Carteret County.  Moving to the Crystal Coast gave us a chance to sample small town living once again but this time we could do it without having having to give up a lot services like we would have if we have gone to some of the other more remote places we visited.  We did our stint of living away from almost everything in the seventies and early eighties.

While looking for a new spot, we went as far north as Chincoteague and as far south as Oak Island and Southport, but Carteret County just seemed to feel like home and offered everything we wanted including reasonably-priced water access.  A number of years ago I wrote down the ten reasons why we chose Carteret County.  While the real estate investment portion of the equation has not turned out like we thought yet, you can say the same thing about most properties that were bought in 2006.  Long term, no one is making any more waterfront property so I suspect our home just twenty-five from the water will do fine.

Many of those services that we desired like a hospital, a few big box stores, and additional restaurants happened to be located in Morehead City which is the commercial center of Carteret County.  In spite of being the heart of area's business world, there are some beautiful waterfront homes in Morehead City.  Just swing off Highway 70 East at around 30th Street and take a left on Evans Street for a few blocks to appreciate just one small neighborhood.

Then there is the wonderful waterfront area where I took the picture at the top of the post.  It a great place to walk off lunch and enjoy the buzzing activity that always seems to take place on the water in Morehead City.   We had driven down to have lunch at Banks Grill which was packed on that recent Sunday afternoon.  I enjoyed my shrimp burger there and the walk afterwards along the water was a good chance to stretch our legs.

As we drove back home by way of Arendell Street, we passed El's Drive-in which was still packed at 3PM in the afternoon. How many places do you know where they still come to your car and take your order?  Even Odell's in Mount Airy has speaker ordering.  We stopped at the Harris-Teeter which is one of a couple places in the county that I can find my favorite  breakfast spread, Marmite, and then headed home to our peaceful spot in country on Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River.

Our trip to the city always makes the arrival at our home even more special.  Morehead City is a big part of the reason why we can live so close to nature without sacrificing any services.  It is an essentail part of the Crystal Coast's magic.  I am happy that the good memories about Morehead City are continuing.

 

Crystal Coast Tomatoes

I would like to say that the secret to great tomatoes is eating more Chinese food but there is a little more to it than saving your chopsticks during the year because they are helpful when growing tomatoes.  I have been growing tomatoes for 44 years.  I have grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Virginia, and most recently in North Carolina which is where I learned how to grow tomatoes long ago by watching my mother and my wife's father.

I have been writing about growing tomatoes for at almost eleven years with my first article being, The Spring Tomato Ritual.  While tomatoes are one of the three things I have said Southerners should grow, gardening especially for tomatoes can be challenging here on the coast.  The rhythm of gardening is different here on the coast.  As hard as it is to believe, we picked our last full sized ripe tomato on December 27, this year.  We got our last ripe cherry tomatoes on January 14, which was the same day we cleaned the green ones off the plant. We were still eating ripe homegrown full sized tomatoes in January.  We finished the last of our ripe cherry tomatoes the third week in February.  We have had some great tomato seasons on the coast with some beautiful crops and once picked over 100 tomatoes in one day.  We drove some of them to relatives in the Piedmont area of the state where tomatoes are not usually ripe until early July.  We often get our first ripe homegrown tomatoes the last week in May.

Since I love early (and late) tomatoes, growing tomatoes is something that I take seriously.  You might not have as much tomato love as I do, but some of my tips might help you be successful in what can be a challenging gardening climate along the Crystal Coast of North Carolina.  The difficulties that you face on our NC coast are far different from the climatic challenge that can make tomatoes something of a gardener's annual victory in eastern Canada.

Our coastal climate is very dependent on where you live.  Our home and garden area is on the water or Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River about three miles up river from Swansboro, NC and the Intracoastal Waterway.  Our climate is tempered by the water but we have had frost as late as March 29.  In fact just last year on that date I lost half of my tomatoes to frost even though they were covered with plastic pails.

I am getting head of myself.  For me tomatoes start with seed.  I usually order my seed by the end of the first week of January.  The year I planted my seeds on January 30.  As you can see from this picture of my tomato seed incubator, it is something of cobbled together outfit.  I use the standard plastic four pack planting pots and square plastic trays that I found at Dollar General for $1 each.  I fill each tray with four four packs. I use one of the trays on the top and bottom to start.  I use potting mix that I buy from Redfearn's Nursery in Cedar Point.  It is the same potting mix he uses to grow his own plants.  I fill each hole with potting soil, wet it a couple of times, and then pour off the excess water that has collected on the tray.  I make a couple of small indentations with a chopstick and try to get just one seed in each hole.  I put the plastic tray top on the cubes, put them on a table that gets sunshine in my office and wait.  In a week to ten days I have a good crop of tiny tomato seedlings.

As you can see from the picture, there are often two or three seedlings in each hole.  When the plants have gotten their second set of leaves, I take the plastic tray that I used for the top and put four more four packs on it.  Again I fill them with potting soil, wet, and drain.  Then I use a plastic knife and spoon to divide the cubes with more than one plant. I carefully place the plants that I separate in a new hole.  Remember to add soil where you took out soil and to carefully add soil around the moved plants. I water the transplants and survivors after adding more planting mix.  It is not unusual for the seedlings to get leggy at this time and need a little support.  I cut chopsticks in half and position them as needed to keep the plants going straight. Sometimes I change the sticks as I rotate the trays three or four times each day as the plants turn towards the sun.

About five to six weeks after I have planted the seeds (around the middle of March this year), I re-pot all my tomato plants into standard peat pots.  Each peat pot get about two tablespoons of potting soil in the bottom, a tablespoon of composted manure, a sprinkle of bone meal, and a few Osomocote long-lasting fertilizer beads.  On top of that goes another tablespoon of potting soil.  I then use my plastic knife to loosen the plant from the edges of the cube and lift it out with a plastic spoon.  I like to make certain all the cubes are wet before I start this.  Once the tomato with its cube of soil is in peat pot I press it down firmly and fill around the plant with more potting soil.  Then I water again and transfer to our wagon and wheelbarrow that are used for hardening off the tomatoes.

At this point the tomatoes are living in the garage and going outside when it is nice and coming back in at night.  You might notice that many of the plants now require a full size chopstick to keep growing straight.  If you look closely, you will see green Velcro planting tape collars on particularly tall plants.  This year the plants stayed in the garage roughly ten days to two weeks.  Wind can really beat plants up at the coast.  That is one of the reasons we use the wagon and wheelbarrow.  If it gets very windy or rainy, we put the plants in the garage.  They also have to be watered at least once each day.

After getting used to living outside, the first fourteen plants went in the ground on March 24 and I planted another 15 plants on March 26.  Before I start putting them into the ground I make sure each peat pot is soaked.  Because of our deep, rock free soil, I am able to plant our tomatoes with a bulb planter. I push it into the ground as far as possible and bring out a core a dirt as cleanly as I can.  I turn the bulb planter upside down over a bucket and tap the bottom of the bucket with the handle. The dirt and sand falls into the bucket without much work. Once again I add bonemeal and Osomocote to the bottom of the hole.  This time I put a trowel full of our homemade compost over that and then I remove the tomato plant from the peat pot, pinch any lower leaves off and carefully place into the hole.  I put the dirt/sand back into the hole in such a way to get the plant straight in the hole. Then once again I water the plant.  After that I put a couple of trowels of Daddy Pete's Raised bed mix around the plant.  Daddy Pete's has a little mulch in it and it helps keeps the plants moist.

By soaking the roots and soil around the tomato plant and then burying it and watering again, you remove most of the risk of the tomato plant dying from being too dry.  In general once tomato plants are in the ground, I try not to water more than once every three days.  That promotes deep root growth.  By burying the tomato several inches, it will have deep roots.  If you compare this picture of the planted Umberto to the Umberto in its peat pot before it was planted, you get an idea of how much of the plant is underground.

So far I have 29 plants in the ground and have given away 23 plants.  I have another 24 left for my daughters. After they pick what they want, I will be giving away a few more to neighbors.

I will be posting further information on tomato pests and even how to prune your tomatoes for maximum yield.  I will also be planting a few more tomato seeds on April 15 and June 1.  I find that having fresh plants makes it easier for the tomatoes to keep producing in the fall and even into early winter.