I have a wonderful brother-in-law who lives in South Carolina. I guess when you live in the South too long you lose the ability to deal with the cooler temperatures of the more Northern climates. I was talking to him on the phone the other night and asked him how the weather was down there. He said it was freezing and that it was interfering with their gardening. I asked him how cold it was and he said that it had gotten as low as 55 degrees. He was afraid that it was too cold for the vegetables in the six raised garden beds they recently planted.

I had to explain to him that I wasn’t doing much in the way of gardening these days. Now that we have twelve inches of snow on the ground and a skim of ice on the lake our gardening projects have slowed up a bit. Seems that 16 degrees is a wee bit too cool for lettuce.

He asked me why in the world I would want to put myself through all that. I told him we loved it up here and that the Mrs. and I were happy as a couple of clams. You just have to be flexible and adapt to situations as they arise, like ice dams, for example.
He had never heard of ice dams in South Carolina. He’s a curious fellow and had to ask what an ice dam was. I explained about how the snow starts to melt along the edge of the roof and then freezes again when the sun goes down. Before long, you have this big ridge of ice forming along the edge of your roof. In no time, water is backing up under your shingles and bingo…it’s running down your inside walls.

He then suggested to me that we should move down South where 55 degrees is considered freezing. I told him that we just have to cope and that the problem is easily solved with a roof rake.
This really got him. “A roof rake” he queried. I explained about my new aluminum roof rake and the four extension poles that came with it. With this device, I can stand on the ground and pull snow off the roof thus preventing the formation of ice dams. He couldn’t believe that I spent my day pulling snow off the roof and that he had spent his day gardening.

I guess there are tradeoffs in life. I’ve got ice dams and roof rakes to deal with but I don’t have armadillos rooting around in my garden and gators in my pond. Life is still good in Northern Michigan.