Weather Musings

I read last year's entry entry for this week and got reminded of how remarkably consistent the weather and garden patterns are: the first snow, the January cold streak, the first bloom. They follow nature's implicit schedule almost to the day. It just dawned on me that I could read up a few weeks in advance and have a fair idea what the weather is going to be like.

The climate on the other hand is a different issue. It slowly shifted towards extremes, a change that has been years in the making and turned out less than user friendly results: hot and rainy summers, exceedingly long winters and inexistent springs. The fall season is the only one that somewhat benefited from the change, even though it lost a reliable and well loved phenomenon: Indian summer. It didn't happen this year, the second year in a row; instead we had bone chilling rain.

I used to wait for this week, which always showed up right on schedule betwee
November 11 and November 17, to do all the fall cleaning in warmth and comfort. For those who don't remember it Indian summer had temperatures in the seventies, blue cloudless skies and perfectly still air, which is a blessing when you're trying to get a mountain of leaves to cooperate. After I had to haul wet and heavy garden debris in less than accommodating temperatures I must say I didn't know how to appreciate this late streak of warm weather while it was still here. I hope the change is not permanent.

It rained too much lately, the plants don't like wet weather at all, there is such a concept as too much of a good thing and it certainly applies to precipitation.

There would be an advantage in shifting to a warmer climate zone if that were the case but it's not: equatorial summers do not a zone six make. The winters got longer and more unpleasant than before.