It’s time to be planting in sunniest part of yard
Out of its little hill faithfully rise
the potatoes dark green leaves,
out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk,
the lilacs bloom in the dooryards.
In the Sky
By the end of April, the Sun has reached a declination of almost 15 degrees, that’s approximately 80 percent of the way to solstice.
Throughout May, Venus and Jupiter share the constellation Aries as the two largest and brightest Morning Stars (Venus the biggest and brightest of all).
The Lyrid Meteors are active after midnight between Cygnus and Hercules during the second and third week of April, peaking on April 23 and 24. These shooting stars often appear at the rate of 15 to 25 per hour.
The Moons of April and May
April 23: The Tadpole Moon is full.
May 1: The Tadpole Moon enters its final quarter.
May 7: The Honeybee Swarming Moon is new.
May 15: The moon enters its second quarter.
May 23: The moon is full. May 30: The moon enters its final quarter.
Weather Trends
This week of Late Spring brings highs above 60 on 75 percent of the afternoons, and warm 70′s or 80′s a little more than half the years. May 2 is the coldest day of the period, bringing cool 50′s on 35 percent of the afternoons and a 20 percent chance of 70′s or 80′s.
Frost strikes only 10 to 15 percent of the mornings and is most likely after the first high-pressure system of the month passes through around the 2nd of the month and after the second system arrives near the 7th.
Each day of the period carries at least a 30 to 35 percent chance of a shower, but some of those days have a much better chance of sun than others. The 6th has an unusual 95 percent chance of clear to partly cloudy skies, making it historically one of only a handful of such days in the year.
The Natural Calendar
Peonies are budding, garlic mustard, celandine and buckeyes flower. All the dandelions go to seed.
Bees, flies and mosquitoes become peskier. Worms breed in the wet earth, and the first young grass snakes hatch and explore the undergrowth.
Redbuds complement the last of the crab apples as the land gets ready for May. Wild phlox, wild geranium, wild ginger, celandine, spring cress, sedum, golden Alexander, thyme-leafed speedwell, garlic mustard, and common fleabane are budding and blooming.
Ducklings and goslings are born along the lakes and rivers; warblers move north.
The Milky Way fills the western horizon as Orion sets just behind the sun. Now the middle of the night’s sky are in their prime spring planting positions, Castor and Pollux to the west, Leo with its bright Regulus directly overhead, and Arcturus dominating the east.
Countdown to Summer
One week until clover blooms
Two weeks to the great warbler migration through the Lower Midwest
Three weeks to strawberry pie
Four weeks until the first orange daylilies blossom
Five weeks until roses flower
Six weeks until the first mulberries are sweet for picking and cottonwood cotton drifts in the wind.
Seven weeks until wild black raspberries ripen
Eight weeks until fledgling robins peep in the bushes
Nine weeks until cicadas chant in the hot and humid days
Ten weeks until thistles turn to down
In the Field and Garden
The high leaf canopy casts the first shade on the flower and vegetable garden. It’s time to be planting in the sunniest part of your property.
Orthodox Easter takes place on April 28 this year. Orthodox Easter animals should be milk fed. They can be a little bit bigger than the Roman Easter lambs (between 40 and 60 pounds), and should be nice and fat.
Fight armyworms and corn borers. Attack carpenter bees around the barn.
Journal
If you look out the window, all of the organisms you see are keeping time. - Jay C. Dunlap
Still, to say we wouldn’t want to live in our primitive past isn’t to say we can’t learn from it. It is, after all, the world in which our currently malfunctioning minds were designed to work like a Swiss watch.robert Wright
The ancient Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, once wrote that a person might predict the weather by paying attention to aching joints and swelling feet. Studies more than 2,000 years later indicate that he may have been understating the connection between the world and the body.
Modern western medicine is now coming up with information that suggests the human organism is not only sensitive to the weather but to the amount of sunlight it receives, to fluctuations in the seasons, and even to the hour of day.
According to some researchers, heart attacks, joint pain, and migraine headaches are more apt to occur near three or four in the morning than at any other times. Body temperature in humans, once thought to be a relatively stable phenomenon, has been found to have cycles, rising in the late afternoon, dropping at night. Blood pressure follows a parallel cycle.
Molecular biologists are discovering genes that serve as the basis for body clocks, and have tracked how certain cues reset these timers as the year progresses. Experimenting with algae, jellyfish, and fireflies, these scientists are giving credibility to classic Taoist theory which posits different times of day and different seasons affect specific organs of the human and animal body in different ways.
Chronobiologists, people who study the apparent self-timing mechanisms of organisms, have recently concluded that even though most people have learned to adapt to the challenges of nature, their complex biological clocks are still running the way they did twenty or thirty millennia ago, indifferent to the power of electricity to turn night into day, paying no attention to climate control systems which shut out heat and cold. Seasonal programs exist deep in our physiology, suggests scientist David Wheeler. They exist, he says, “in cells, tissues, and in the brain itself, where a cluster of about 10,000 neurons buried in the middle of the brain may serve as the master clock.”
If Wheeler and his sources are correct, these cerebral schedules affect our moods and attitudes from day to day, and may even shape our whole philosophy of life. Time once ran a lengthy essay which focused on how the biological body had not yet adapted to modern inventions. We may be still geared, mused the author, Robert Wright, to the archaic routine of hunting and gathering and living in caves, and he cited evidence from evolutionary psychologists that indicate modern stress and emotional trauma may stem directly from the inability to match our current lifestyle with the atavic timetable of the body.
Deep in our anatomy, the inner clocks, constantly foiled by our 21st century schedules, at first are not intrusive and sound no violent warnings. Ignored for any length of time, however, they assert themselves in insidious ways, appearing perhaps as a vague sensation that something is out of kilter, and ending in some cases with existential crisis, a suicidal conclusion that life has no meaning, the appearance of a tumor, or breakdown of the immune system.
Caught up in the need to make a living and manage family affairs, we tend to attribute feelings and states of mind to the dynamics of social interaction. In fact, there are compelling reasons to become aware of the forces to which are hearts and minds are set: the direction of the wind, the scent of the afternoon, the calls of the birds and insects, movements of the sun and the stars, the coming of summer and winter.