Prepare mulch for November protection of sensitive plants and shrubs

Although we talk so much about coincidence, we do

not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it

has meaning. — J. B. Priestly

The moon

The Travelling Toad and Frog Moon entered its final quarter on Oct. 28 at 3:05 p.m. This week of the darkening moon is a perfect lunar time for completing garden planting of bulbs and perennials.

Fishing and scouting for game are favored when the moon is overhead these mornings, and your luck should increase as the Halloween cold front and the fronts of Nov. 2 and 6 approach. Creatures will sometimes be most active as the barometer falls in advance of these weather systems.

Weather trends

Highs are usually in the 50s or 60s, with the odds for 70s about one in four. The danger of frost remains similar to that of the third week in October; about one night in three receives temperatures in the upper 20s or lower 30s. But by this late in the season, the chances of a hard freeze have risen past 50 percent, and the odds get better each night for killing lows.

This week is generally a brighter one than last week. Chances of sun are about 70 percent throughout the period, and some of the driest October days are the 26th, 28th, and 29th (with just a 15 to 20 percent chance of precipitation). The sixth high-pressure system of the month usually arrives near Halloween. If it is approaching on the 31st, that evening will be warm, with maybe a little rain. If the front arrives on the 29th or 30th, the eve of all All Saints Day is usually chilly.

Zeitgebers (Events in nature that tell the time of year)

Hosta seedpods crack, revealing their ebony contents. The last cabbage butterflies look for cabbages. The last daddy longlegs hunt in the flowerbeds and wood piles.

In many years, the canopy is almost completely open by this time of the month. White snakeroot seeds come apart in downy clusters like thistle seeds or goldenrod. The final aster blossoms disappear. Smartweed withers.

Winter craneflies spin in the sun. Asian lady beetles

seek winter refuge in crevices of house siding.

Forsythia sometimes blooms again this week. At night, sluggish crickets fill in for the silent katydids.

Winds now start to rise to their winter speed, an average of nearly 15 miles an hour.

Mind and body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, rises throughout the period, reaching a troublesome 60 by Halloween and then climbing into the 70s as the moon reaches perigee on Nov. 4. People who experience Seasonal Affective Disorder will have their first bout with emotional challenges in the weeks ahead.

In the field and garden

Dig up onions; remove the mum tops; cut flowers and herbs for drying. Get your woodpile covered, too. Transplant perennials. Put in new shrubs and trees.

Half of the corn has generally been cut for grain; soybeans are 75 percent harvested in most years..

Begin major watering of shrubs and trees and continue through mid-November in order to provide plantings — especially new transplants — with full moisture for the winter months

Prepare mulch for November protection of sensitive plants and shrubs.

Winter wheat is usually 90 percent planted, 65 percent emerged. Fall apple picking is often complete by this week.

Wrap young, newly planted trees with burlap to help them ward off winter winds. Complete fall field and garden tillage before the November rains.

Journal

The hill…is a voyager standing still. Never moving a step, it travels through years, seasons, weathers, days and nights. These are the measures of its time, and they alter it, marking their passage on it as on a man’s face….

— From “A Native Hill” by Wendell Berry

Ed Davis got me started, sending me the quotation above. And I sit on the back porch this evening, watching birds, images and feelings moving across me in waves. I am the “voyager standing still.”

The day before, a friend had told me about a poem in which a meditator sits with Jesus until his ego disappears and only Jesus is left. Wrapped in sensation, I become the hill. I become the Jesus of the poem, losing myself in the autumnal measures of time:

All day long, the peak of maple color spreads across the town and countryside. South of the city, great flocks of blackbirds gather in the cut-over soybean fields. At my feeders, sparrows alternate with black-capped chickadees, with aromas of plants and fruits I can’t name or recall, layers of other autumns, the flickering of years that have no names.

In the garden in front of me, three small, orange Mexican sunflowers stand bright against the neighbor’s dark woods. Two pink canna lilies remain from the summer. Earlier in the day, I had seen that almost all the leaves of TK’s maple tree were down, that the Danielsons’ maple had turned overnight, that Lil’s tree, the latest maple on my High Street block, was suddenly ochre. It seems that keeping track of one tree or another over the years keeps the collapse of summer more manageable. It is enough that these particular trees come down, parts for the whole, short-circuiting the awareness that everything is falling apart; only these trees are dissolving.

Now the sunset through the backyard trees matches the dusky, sweet-peach breasts of my October chickadees, measures the time against Berry’s hill, and at dusk I prove to myself once again that I exist, and that I look for God, wait for Jesus to arrive, wondering if the geese will fly over again in the early dark like they did yesterday, so many things still unnamed, unworded for winter.

Bill Felker’s “Poor Will’s Almanack for 2022,” is now available. In addition to weather, farming and gardening information, reader stories and astronomical data, this edition contains 50 essays from Bill’s weekly NPR radio segment on WYSO. For your autographed copy, send $22 to: Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387, or order from either Amazon or www.poorwillsalmanack. com.