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| Winter Cold and Rain February 17, 2008 10:40:42 Everyone complains about the weather and if you wait a little while it will change to something else. We have had a lot of variety this winter but a near constant has been the cold temperatures. This morning it is about 45 degrees and it seems pretty nice and warm. We had a lot of rain overnight and no one in this area can complain about that. Soon we will have had enough rain for a while. The Illinois river is full to its banks. We crossed it on Friday evening on our way to Quincy to play music at a pub. I was surprised how much the river has come up in the past week. We are done hauling water. Our well is about full now and we should be working on acquiring some reserve soil moisture. We had one interesting day when the fog was so heavy you could not see more than about thirty feet in the middle of the afternoon. I took some pictures that morning. The first pic below is an old walnut tree on the edge of the field out front of the house. Next is looking towards the garden on the west side of the house. The last is our lane as it comes down to the house from the public road which is about 1/4 mile away. There are power line poles along the lane. Visibility at this point was about 100 feet. It got worse as the day went on and visibility got down to about 25 or 30 feet. 
The consistent feature this winter has been the low temperatures. Customarily, we have cold but also have some warm-ups during the winter months. We really have not had the warm period this winter aside from one day a couple of weeks ago when it was about 60 degrees. That lasted one day and then it was back down to thirties or below. We have had numerous days when the temperature did not get out of the twenties. It is for these reasons it seemed very nice this morning at 45. You know how it goes. In the fall you put on a sweater when it gets down to 60 and in the spring you take the sweater off when it gets up to 60. The cold is not a bad thing for the garden. In fact it probably is good because it does degrade the insect population to some extent. Although, my guess is that variable weather with more warm periods and swings back to cold would probably be harder on insects. If an insect was not well adapted to periods of cold in this climate they would not persist from year to year. It remains to be seen what the next 6 weeks will bring. When the weather warms a little one begins to feel a certain sense of anticipation of working the ground and putting some seeds in. In a way it seems hard to imagine working in the warm sunshine without all the necessary clothing of winter time. We have just enough of each to season to forget what the others were like. Although, I do dread the hot summer sun and humidity. I may be lucky to have something planted by April 1st. But, I will be ready in early March for break and a chance to put those first seeds in the ground. Comment on this article | |