The other night, I hurt my hand mildly before improv practice and arrived late. I told my team about it as I took off my mitten. They screamed when they saw my hand. “Yeah,” I thought in satisfaction, “I have a legitimate injury.”
I took off my other mitten and they screamed again. Both my hands were bright red and purple. “I have bad circulation,” I muttered. I guess I don’t get glory points for an injury after all.

Raynaud’s prevents proper blood circulation in fingers and toes, and I pretend I don’t have it. My mother has it, and her fingers can turn pure white in the winter. Mine has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. My toes can turn white if I don’t protect them properly, but I mostly see the effects in my hands. When they get cold, they turn a dark purple, almost dead-looking, which heals to a swollen red that lasts for weeks. If my hands get intensely cold, even for a minute, I get chilblains, an affliction of Victorian orphans. My knuckles or fingertips turn bright red and swell to twice their size, and get itchy when they’re hot and painful when they’re cold. (It’s a cool party trick to hold up pinkie so swollen that it looks like the other one belongs to a baby. Except when the people at the party actually care about you they get worried.)

Out of 25 people who work at Natureworks, FOUR have Raynaud’s. That is more than I’ve ever met in my life. One works in the office, and one was smart enough to become a houseplant expert, but a landscape crew leader and I work outside a lot. I genuinely do not know how Lisa, the landscaper, survives out there. But I will share with you the things that have worked for me.

1. ​Don’t let your fingers and toes get cold. It’s not stupid advice, ok. The absolute best prevention is keeping your hands and toes warm. That means not gardening when it’s too cold, or going inside at the first tingle of cold in your fingers. It also means not being lazy when going from the house to the car; wear a pair of mittens! One minute of exposure is enough to make me suffer for days, personally, and it’s probably the same for anyone else with circulation problems. When gardening, wear gloves or mittens, and don’t be shy about using hand warmers. You can even buy or make mini microwaveable handwarmers to reduce waste.
2. Around the house, wear fingerless gloves. My mom does this and is trying to convince me to do it. I should, since I’m in a room that is comfortably warm but my fingers are decidedly cold.
3. Keep your hands and feet moisturized. When I get chilblains, they last forever if I don’t moisturize. The best thing I’ve found for them is Burt’s Bees Farmer’s Friend. Applying it twice a day usually helps. It keeps your skin in great condition and better able to ward off the bad effects of getting too cold.
4. Medication. My doctor put me on Amlodipine for the cold months. It’s a blood thinner, I believe. It mostly just staves off the most dramatic effects of poor circulation. I still have to wear mittens and use lotion.

​

It was 50 degrees today, and I saw two bees buzz by my face—one was a bumble bee and one was a smaller one, but not a honeybee. I had just put up a mason bee house (picture one). It’s for our native bees who lay their eggs in tubes. You place it 5 ft from the ground facing East and hopefully some bees make their home with you. It helps to provide nectar flowers for them.
Picture two is a birdbath for insects as well. It has atheneum steps for bugs to drink without drowning! Behind it is a recycling bin I use to grow vegetables. I’m noticing its bulging sides—the soil seems to have frozen and I hope it doesn’t crack!
​Picture three is the sugar water I ran inside to make when I saw the two bees. I just mixed some sugar into hot water and added some cold water to temper it. I certainly have no nectar flowers blooming, so this is the next best thing I can offer. The only thing I can think of that is blooming now is the spring-blooming witch hazel. Hamamelis...something. Not virginiana, because that’s our native one that blooms in November (great for late pollinators). The spring blooming one is not native, but might be worth including in your yard for these early insects. It can grow into a small tree but will stay a large shrub if you cut it often.

In other news, something has made its home under our shed, and another something dug tunnels in our compost pile. The last thing that made a home under our shed was promptly eaten by a fox. I saw the fox walk away chewing something. Unfortunately, two foxes have been killed in the road near us.
And a bird excreted a favor for me on the impromptu birdbath I made. (The bowl of it was frozen to the ground—whoops.) I genuinely think there are more birds visiting our yard this year. Last year I remember lamenting that no birds stopped, save for the pair that nests in the spruce out front each year.

I’ve seen five kinds of birds in the yard in the past two days!
-the big fat grey and white bird
-little grey and white winter birds (at least four at once ruffling through the leaves and dead plants)
-a woodpecker
-a mourning dove
-a hawk

Why am I so excited about birds? They signal the health of an ecosystem, since they’re relatively far up the food chain. More birds means more diversity below them on the food chain (insect and plant) and a more resilient ecosystem.
​

A big fat grey and white bird with a long tail just landed in my yard! He was checking out my froze birdbath, which I should pour some warm water into, so he can have a drink.
I’ve been lamenting the barren wasteland that no birds come to, so it’s delightful to see one. Of course the cat got out a few minutes later. So far the only casualty has been a chipmunk, but even that is too much. When wildlife returns to the yard, I am going to have to keep the cats inside all the time. No short jaunts in the great outdoors. Growing cat grass and playing with them regularly should help.

​I've lain awake the last few nights listening to the wind howl. It howled a lot in the fall as well. I went out to determine the direction and found that it was whipping from the South and Southwest, right through the front yard. Willy Weather confirmed it. They have a great feature that tracks current wind speed and direction, and they have records for the past few months. Seems like the wind generally blows anywhere from Northwest to West to South in our yard, with the strongest wind coming from the West.
Why does wind matter to a garden? It warps trees or places undue stress on them, and can inhibit all plant growth. Livestock exposed to strong wind are about 1/3 lighter than sheltered livestock because they use so much energy to stay up!
It’s our front yard that catches wind the hardest; it’s on a busy street, which acts as a wind tunnel. I thought it was protected enough by the surrounding houses and trees, but I was wrong. So I redesigned the gardens.
(I honestly don’t know why some streets create faster than others. It probably has something to do with building height. Our old house was amongst tall city buildings and the gusts were huge. If you’re wondering whether you need to redesign your food forest to include wind protection, listen to the wind at night, or go out in a wind event to see what the wind is doing in your little yard.)
My new design includes a windbreak hedge, which creates a warm and calm microclimate within. I was somewhat dismayed when I realized that I had to include a windbreak; I wanted my garden on display, and I wanted to fit the maximum number of trees in the front yard. But a hedge provides other benefits, such as nesting locations for birds and a sensical way to include shrubs I wanted but didn’t include in the original design.

To choose the shrubs to include, I went to Martin Crawford’s handy dandy book. Not great options. I wanted my hedge to be entirely native plants (Read the book Bringing Nature Home to find out why) and Crawford has no problem with planting plants from other continents.
Some ground rules for windbreaks:

1. ​They will shelter a distance eight times their height. So a 1 foot tall shrub will protect the 8 feet behind it. Measure the area you want to protect and divide it by 8. (For me that means a 3-4ft tall shrub)
2. Choose something that will grow to the dimensions you want. No sense trimming hedges. Other people can do that but not you.
3. The ideal windbreak has a flat face to the wind, not concave.
4. Plant your windbreak to block the wind rather than following your property lines.
5. Make it a continuous line, no gaps.
   

I disregarded him on a lot of this, just based on the constraints of my yard. Here are the native shrubs he listed that I considered using as hedges:

• Salal, or Gaultheria shallon This is a Western native with edible berries. It’s 5 feet tall, evergreen, and forms nice little colonies. I was so close to choosing this for my hedge, but I really do not want birds spreading the berries into the nearby woods, thereby planting shrubs that don’t belong here.
• Pussy Willow, or Salix discolor. These are moisture loving plants and my yard is quite dry so I know these babies would wither and die. They can also get quite tall. But it’s a truly excellent shrub for insects and birds if you have the space and moist or clay soil.
• Rosa carolina or blanda. Carolina Rose is thorny and spreads by suckers, so it would be a maintenance nightmare. Good edible rosehips though. Rosa blanda is thornless and short (3 ft) but a packet of seeds costs $17 and I’ve never seen it available at the garden center, so it might be a challenge to get.

​Here are my final choices:

So, I decided on:

• ​Aronia melanocarpa or Black Chokecherry. I have seeds that suggest it will grow between 3 and 9 feet tall so I’m going to cross my fingers for the short ones and anticipate something like 6 feet tall and wide. This is native and makes berries that are supposedly yummy.
• Ceanothus americanus or New Jersey Tea. This breaks the rules because it’s slow growing and concave, but it’ grows to 4 ft and fixes Nitrogen so it’s good in other ways.
• I’m also throwing in some sort of bush cherry I ordered from Fedco because it has to go somewhere.

So there is my yard redesigned for wind protection. At Christmas, I showed all of this to my friends and one of them said “you have thought about this more than I have thought about anything in my life”. I know it’s a lot, but I’m trying to synthesize everything I’m learning into a plan that’s as fail-proof as I can. Also, it is so fun to do.