Time to inspect trees for winter damage, remove dead and dying limbs
A redwing singing almost furiously from a marshy site, meadowlarks calling from the orange sunlit swamp grass around the edge of a small pond. A toad or two send up their trill – water bugs are out – a\ cold wind blows out of the North – I walk through the swamp pasture, and I sink deep in the turf, the water bubbling around my shoes.
— Charles Burchfield, Journal
THE FOURTH WEEK OF EARLY SPRING Astronomical data and lore
The Broody Hen Supermoon wanes throughout the period, entering its final quarter at 4:35 a.m. on March 16. Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, this moon passes overhead in the middle of the night.
On March 19, Spring Equinox occurs at 10:51 p.m.
The sun enters Pisces at the same time,
Before midnight, Leo and Regulus are overhead. Winter’s Pleiades and Taurus lead Orion into the far west.
The Big Dipper protrudes deep into the center of the sky. By six o’clock in the morning, the stars have become a prophecy of Late Summer, August’s Vega almost overhead, Hercules a little to its east, the Northern Cross to its west.
Weather trends
The March 14-15 cold front is often accompanied by brighter skies for a day or so before it moves toward the Atlantic to make way for the much stronger and more disruptive weather system of March 19-20. That cold front is one of the last wintry fronts in the South; even in the central portion of the country, it marks the end of the worst of the weather systems of the first half of the year.
Countdown to spring
■ One week to daffodil season, and honeysuckle leafing season, until silver maple blooming season and until the first male goldfinches turn gold and white tundra swans arrive along Lake Erie
■ Two weeks to tulip season and the first wave of blooming woodland wildflowers and the first butterflies
■ Three weeks until golden forsythia blooms and skunk cabbage sends out its first leaves and the lawn is long enough to cut
■ Four weeks until American toads sing their mating songs in the evenings and corn planting time begins. Watch for morel mushrooms to swell in the dark.
■ Five weeks until the peak of Middle Spring wildflowers in the wood and the full bloom of flowering fruit trees
■ Six weeks until the first rhubarb pie
■ Seven weeks until the first cricket song of Late Spring
■ Eight weeks to the great warbler migration through the Lower Midwest
■ Nine weeks until the first roses and orange ditch lilies open and until all tender vegetables and flowers can be set out in the garden
■ Ten weeks until the high canopy begins shades the garden;
In the field and garden
Mites, scale, and aphid eggs will mature quickly when the temperatures climb above 60 degrees.
The insects will be more easily controlled by dormant oil spray the closer they are to hatching.
Inspect trees for winter damage.
Remove dead and dying limbs.
Onions seeds and sets, radishes, beets, carrots and turnips can be sown directly in the ground anytime the soil is ready.
Set flats of pansies out of doors on milder days to harden them for late March or early April planting
Warm-weather crops such as tomatoes and peppers should be ready to set out in the first of May if you start them this week under lights.
Snowbird notebook
Sarasota, Florida: Complete semi-tropical habitat, no sign of Ohio winter.
Looking back over today’s daybook, I see how all the notes throughout the years point south, look forward.
The notations from the cold, Midwestern Januarys are fragments of longing as well as projections, reachings toward, visualizing, collecting pieces of the puzzle of spring knowing that the completion is only a matter of distance or circumstance or decision, realizing that the details of January – such as cardinal song or the sighting of bluebirds or the gathering of geese or the appearance of snowdrop tips pushing through the mulch – are almost artificial constructs, a toying with promises and signs, the fulfillment of which already exists only a few hundred miles away. And yet, for all those years, that fulfillment felt so achingly, impossibly distant.
I am reminded of the time I was stationed at Fort Clayton in Panama half a century ago, a trip to Bogota, Colombia in the Andes surprised me with the change in altitude and temperature, showed me that the thick, moist air of the tropics was simply downhill from the sharp chill of the mountains.
And when I visited my daughter Neysa in Italy in 2010 and we drove up the foothills of the Apennines from the wildflowers of May back into the wildflowers of April to buy cheese from shepherds, I felt the same sense of dislocation, felt again the contradiction of expectations, the confusion from landscape forming warps in my consciousness, revealing to me once again the unreliability of perspective and the illusion of stability.
Explore THE WEATHER BOOK of Poor Will’s Almanack! For your autographed copy, send $20.00 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. Or order on line at Amazon. com.
Warm-weather crops such as tomatoes and peppers should be ready to set out in the first of May if you start them this week under lights.