Shelter from the cold

Somehow, in less than a month, we've gone from summer to winter. Two or three weeks ago, it was so warm out that I was too hot in just a single layer of clothing; this week, I've been piling on four layers, including my winter coat and long johns, and still feeling like the wind is blowing right through me. It's the kind of weather that you can best enjoy by observing it from indoors, snuggled up on the couch with a blanket and a hot drink.

But there are other creatures in our yard that don't have a cozy indoor space to retreat to. Such as, for instance, the family of stray cats, a mother and two kittens, that Brian and I have been feeding throughout the year. (Yes, I know you're not supposed to feed strays because they kill birds, but the way I figure it, they won't kill as many birds if they have something else to eat.) As far back as last summer, Brian and I were discussing whether we wanted to try to provide "our" outdoor cats with some sort of shelter during the winter. But when Brian looked into what kind of shelter would be appropriate, it started to seem kind of complicated. Ideally, it would have at least two sets of walls, inner and outer, with a space between them for insulation. It would need two separate entrances, since cats don't like to be trapped in a place with only one exit. And the entrances would either need to be covered with some sort of door or else turn a corner to keep the wind from blowing in. It wouldn't be simple to construct, and unless we could find a corner of the yard where it would stay tucked away all year, we'd have to store it once spring came.

I was thinking about this one day while I was out on the patio, moving around the outdoor furniture and wondering how long we should wait before storing it away in the shed for winter. I wasn't looking forward to this task, since it's a bit of a hassle to cram it in there, and once it's in you have basically no access to anything else behind it. And it occurred to me that maybe if we just covered the table and chairs up with tarps, not only could they stay out all winter, but they could also serve as a sort of tent shelter for the outdoor cats. It wouldn't be as warm as a properly insulated shelter, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

Originally, I thought we wouldn't even need to buy anything for this project, since we already had a couple of old plastic drop cloths stashed away in the shed. But when Brian pulled them out, he found that the outdoor conditions had taken their toll on the plastic, which tore like tissue paper at the slightest pressure. Fortunately, the sale flier for the nearby Ocean State Job Lot was advertising outdoor tarps at fairly low prices. They were sold out of the 8x10 size, and Brian thought 5x7 would be too small, so we ended up buying one "basic" tarp in size 10x12 and one "tear-resistant" 12x16 one for a total of $32.

Assembling the shelter was a bit of a puzzle. First, we pushed the table up against the side of the house to take advantage of its thermal mass. (The wall warms up in the sun during the day and radiates that heat away at night, so it's a little warmer right next to it than it is out in the open.) Next, we took all the cushions off the chairs and stacked them under the table to provide a layer of padding and insulation from the cold ground. 

Then we covered the entire table with the smaller of the two tarps. It was bigger than we actually needed, so we doubled part of it over and still had enough to reach down to the ground on all sides. We tucked it under the feet of the table and added a couple of bricks to help weigh it down. On my end, I simply tucked up a fold of the fabric to make a tent-flap kind of entrance, but Brian decided to create a more defined entrance on the other side by tucking up part of the fabric and holding it in place with a clamp. 

After that came the trickiest part: piling all the chairs on top. Brian thought maybe we should just settle for two chairs and leave the other two loose, but I thought it we were going to cover the furniture we should try to cover all of it. So after some maneuvering, we found a way to interlock the chairs so that they'd all fit with only the legs of two of them hanging off the edge. We attached them together with some small bungee cords to keep the pile stable.

Then we took the larger and sturdier tarp and put it over this entire pile. Once again, we had way more fabric than we needed and ended up partly doubling it over before securing it under the table legs and adding a row of bricks to hold it down. And even then, there was still a lot of loose fabric overhanging at one end. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tuck all this excess material out of the way before I had the idea to incorporate the metal trash can we'd already put out on the patio, lying on its side, to keep the cats' food dish from getting wet when it rained. So we sort of wrapped all the extra tarp material around this to make a sort of vestibule. This had the added advantage that next time the cats came looking for their food, they'd be sure to find and investigate the entrance to the tent. And indeed, the next day, I spotted one of the kittens emerging from it, so now we know that the cats have found the shelter and feel comfortable using it.

This, along with a restock of the bird feeder, took care of the animals in our yard. But we still had the plants to consider. Our parsley, which never minds the cold, is still looking green and healthy, so we haven't touched that, but we harvested what was left of the arugula, along with all the winter squash from the volunteer vine in the side yard. We got half a dozen of varying sizes, but some weren't fully ripe yet, and a couple of them had split open in the cold. So we're not counting this squash as part of our official harvest until we figure out how much of it will turn out to be edible.

Brian also went out and dug up the horseradish roots that he planted last spring. These were a bit of a disappointment; although at least one of the plants had been large and flourishing, the actual roots were only about twice the size they'd been when we planted them. After spending $12 and putting in all the effort required to plant and harvest them, we only ended up with a few ounces of horseradish — and we're not even sure how much of that will be usable. So while growing these was an interesting experiment, it's not one we're planning to repeat.

Lastly, we decided to make some effort to winter-proof our outdoor rosemary plant. Where we live, in USDA Zone 7, growing rosemary year-round is a dicey proposition; according to most gardening sites, you can't reasonably expect it to survive the winter unless you dig it up, put it in a pot, and bring it indoors. But ours was too big for that, and we'd occasionally had rosemary plants make it through the winter before, so we decided we'd at least take a crack at keeping it alive. 

Rather than trimming it back to three inches and burying it in compost, as most gardening sites recommend for growers in Zone 8 and higher, we decided to try a tip from Gardeners' Path: covering it with plastic. We didn't have any "floating row covers," but Brian happened to have a large plastic bag stashed away that he thought would be big enough to enclose it. He poked some holes around the edge of this and threaded through a piece of thick string to make a drawstring top, and then we sort of wrestled the plant into it and pulled the string snug to hold the bag in place. Then we piled leaves around the base for insulation, and we'll hope that keeps the plant warm enough to keep it alive until spring.

And with that, we are fully prepared for winter, indoors and out. When the wind kicks up and it's just too unpleasant to venture outside, we can snuggle up with our blankets and hot drinks without guilt, knowing that we've done our best to keep all the other critters on our property comfortable too.