Spring Is Coming, Just Not Yet

The weather this day is not especially unusual for mid-March here at our homeplace. It’s not extremely cold (19 degrees overnight and 21 degrees at noon), but we do have about ten to twelve inches of newly fallen snow on the ground and it’s still coming down steadily. Wind gusts tonight and tomorrow are predicted to be in the 50 to 60 mph range. The birds were attempting to get the few remaining seeds from the snow-covered food bowls, so we cleared containers, replenished the food supply, and moved the bowls to a slightly more sheltered location on the deck. We just made a path to our car, cleared snow and ice from the doors and windows, and drove the three-tenths mile to our mailbox to retrieve a package, making a bit of a track through the snow with our tires. The snow is incredibly beautiful, but it seems this might be a good day to post some non-snow photos. I hope you enjoy them. Remember, spring officially begins just six days from today.

Flame azalea (wild)

Bleeding heart

 

Bee on goldenrod

Fritillary butterfly on coneflower

Daisies (wild)

Turk’s cap lily (wild)

Bees on sunflower (planted by chipmunks)

Flame azalea (wild)

Beautiful and Cold New Year’s Day

Mountain to our east in hoar frost and snow

Our first day of 2018 dawned beautiful and very cold. The fine snow that started in the afternoon yesterday continued through the night, giving us a bit more than an inch by morning. The snow is very light and powdery because of the extremely dry air and bitter cold, -1 at its lowest overnight. 

We had to get out for a bit to walk through the quiet beauty and take a few photos. We already have so many we’ve taken on snowy days over the years but can never resist taking a few more. Seems that having the camera in hand focuses my attention on the beautiful sights to be seen all around us. The snow also accentuates the shapes and forms of the mountains and trees. The fluffy snow sits in puffs atop the pine and spruce needles, occasionally coming off in a cloud of snow dust when a sudden gust shakes the branches. Rhododendron leaves are curled tight against the cold. Even though we see these places every day, each new day is unique and every view is rewarding.

Tracks in the snow reveal that our rabbit friends have been out and about, going up and down our road, sometimes individually and sometimes in pairs. A neighbor cat who frequently comes to check us out has also left the prints of its slow, methodical walk. Someone else has been running along the road, larger than a cat but smaller than most dogs – perhaps a fox. I would love to be able to see all the coming and going during the nights.

The birds are staying close around the suet feeders today; cold weather brings them out in profusion. They all appear about twice their normal sizes, feathers fluffed up to provide extra insulation against the cold. Melting snow drips from a corner of the roof  and is forming a large icicle on one of the feeders, making the diners dodge the possible cold shower. 

Returning to the welcoming warmth of our house in winter is always a delight. We can sit and watch our little friends and still enjoy the views of the snow-covered landscape. What a great way to start this new year. I hope your New Year’s Day and all your coming days will be great also. May you enjoy them all!

Puffs of snow on pine needles

Fraser Fir with snow sitting atop hoar frost

Icy suet feeder

A Bit of Weather

We’re closing the year (2017) with a period of cold weather, as is a large portion of the northern US. The temperature when we woke this morning was 14 degrees. The ground was covered with a light dusting of very fine snow and everything was covered in hoar frost (frozen fog). High temperatures for much of the past week were in the 20s and forecasts for the next week show highs in single digits or teens for most days and lows in single digits or lower. Many people think since we live in North Carolina we don’t have cold winters; this is the South after all. But we live in the northwest corner of North Carolina where our state meets Tennessee and Virginia and we live in the mountains, the Appalachians. The closest peaks which surround us range from about 4800 feet to 5600 feet and we nestle on the slope at 4200 feet. We’ve read that each thousand feet of increase in elevation above sea level is equivalent to moving 300 miles farther north. That calculation would put us well up in the upper tier of the US states. Comparing some of our winter temps with relatives and friends in Michigan and Minnesota, our extremes are not very different.

Of course weather depends on much more than just elevation. We get a good bit of snow most years, usually beginning during October and ending as late as May. The year we moved here we actually got about 3 inches on the Memorial Day weekend. The average annual snowfall at our house is probably around 50 inches, but one recent year recorded about 110 inches. The snow usually comes in spurts; we get several inches and then the weather warms and the snow goes away. But some years the ground has been covered from December through March. Our biggest single snowfall was about 30 inches; that required lots of shoveling to get in and out again.

Temperatures can also vary widely. We can usually expect at least a few winter nights when temperatures will drop below zero. Our all time low here at our house was a very chilly 32 degrees below zero. That was cold! But in summers a hot day is in the upper 80s; I don’t recall any days when the high got into the 90s. Average year-round temperature is about 40 degrees, which is the constant temperature of our spring water. We can live with no air conditioning in the house and still be comfortable most summer days. I’ll take that kind of summer heat anytime.

Winds are also a factor in our weather and can be quite a dramatic factor as you move higher up the mountains, particularly in more exposed locations. We are somewhat protected by the mountains to our north and west, but we can still get buffeted. It’s not unusual to have forecasts calling for gusts in the 50 to 60 mph range. We can hear the winds roaring across the ridges and coming down the slopes through the surrounding woods. And we can feel the house shaking during extremes, especially when a hurricane decides to come this far inland as several have during our time here.

So the weather here is interesting, changing frequently enough for our taste. We knew the winters would be cold and we hoped the summers would not be too hot. We have four good seasons, all of which we enjoy. What more could we want?

The Harvest Before the Cold

[Written in October, 2017]

The temperature is supposed to drop into the 20s several nights during the next week and then only rise into the 30s in daytime. That’s not unusual weather for us. We had our first killing frosts of this year a week or so ago; that’s later than usual since the average first frost comes during the last week of September. Our weather has been generally warmer lately, but now the time to shift into cold weather mode is upon us. So today was a good time for us to harvest those few goodies still lingering in our garden.

Beans were first on the list. We got a late start on planting many things this year, so scarlet runner beans and Christmas limas were still hanging on our wonderful bean arch. The heavy wire cattle fencing panels arched across two raised beds and the walkway between gives us an arched trellis about six and a half feet high, eight feet wide, and twenty four feet long.

We can walk through the shady tunnel picking beans on each side and over our heads. Our delayed planting meant the plants did not reach full production this year, but we still got a good picking and enjoyed some for supper tonight.

Carrots, beets, and chard were also ready for this pre-cold weather harvesting. We were impressed and delighted with both the carrots and beets. We had thought neither crop was going to amount to much, so we were quite surprised when they were pulled from their hiding place beneath the soil to reveal some of our best looking roots ever. More good eating to look forward to on the coming winter nights.

There was also corn to be picked. This was not sweet corn; that had already been harvested and enjoyed earlier in the garden season. No this was what many people consider ornamental corn, used purely for decoration; however we harvest it dry to be ground with our small hand mill. We first tried this several years ago and discovered it makes the most delicious cornbread ever, with a wonderful chewy texture like no other. We had almost decided not to bother saving this corn crop. The late start coupled with some severe windstorms had left most of the stalks looking quite unpromising. The stalks were tall, but most had been blown over at a forty-five-degree angle and were twisted; the ears also seemed smaller and much less developed than in previous years. But since it was there, I picked it. It wouldn’t hurt to at least see what we had.

What a delight when I started pulling back the shucks. The ears were small and they were not very fully developed. But they were beautiful! Every ear was different, gorgeous mosaics in incredible shades of blues, burgandies, reds, yellows, pinks, whites, greys, and greens. I could hardly wait for the revelations of each new ear. And even the silks were a marvelous golden honey color, shining like silken strands of hair in the brilliant autumn sunlight. We hang the dried ears by their pulled-back shucks from a line stretched between two posts in our house, perfect decorations while awaiting their use in the cornbread.

As I was working with the corn (not really work, but pure pleasure), I was thinking how good it would be if everyone had at least a small garden, growing some of their own food, and participating in the cycle of planting and tending and then harvesting their crops. In this time when apparently many young people and even adults have no idea where many of our fruits and vegetables come from and what is involved in producing the food we eat, wouldn’t it good to have that link to the earth, the source of our sustenance.

I also thought with gratitude of those ancient ancestors back when our predecessors were hunter-gatherers. Over the course of untold ages those people closely observed the world around them and learned from the processes of the natural world. Those people saw how plants produced the food they consumed and realized they could use those processes to feed themselves. They developed the basics of agriculture, expanded it, improved it. How good it is to continue along that path they began.

I was just picking corn. But it was really so much more than that to me.