Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Still winter?

The water-logged grass crackled under my feet when I walked down to the shop this morning: oh yes, winter is still trying to hang on for dear life. Temperatures seem unwilling to take the leap into the double digits, in fact have lingered around +5 during the day for quite some time, and night time temperatures have dropped as low as -8 even during the last few days. 



Whenever we cautiously dare to hope that now, finally, the spell is broken we get another blast of winter. Strangely, this seems to happen every weekend, as in this picture taken last Saturday. Winds gusts up to 80 km/h whipped the thin dense veil of snow into small drifts that tried to attach to the crusty, dirty snow banks still left from months of winter. For a few hours the just exposed patches of lawn were once again covered up.


 



It is a losing battle, however: gravel roads are bare, and bare spots show up increasingly in fields and pastures, too. Even with these modest temperatures the melting process is making steady progress. Geese, too, must think it is time: instead of a couple here and there we now see the first larger groups flying overhead, long stretched-out Vs aimed unerringly north or northwest. Every morning and evening the air is filled with their honking voices, and often I stop and search the sky when I hear them in the distance, delighted when I watch their approach from behind the trees, long necks stretched out, wing beat slow and steady. At other times their passing is so quiet that I can hear the whoosh of their wings when they are low enough, interrupted only by bits of conversation muttered in their low, dark voices, talking quietly among each other, like passengers on a night train.  

With more and more snow converted to melt water lakes in the fields it must have seemed safe enough for the ducks to return as well. On Sunday I spotted the first metallic green heads in a crowd of Canada geese: mallards, busily diving in search of food.

They are not the only ones who enjoy the open water: Leo, too, loves it and seems oblivious to its temperature.


 


When I took this picture a few days ago I didn’t notice the bald eagle sitting in the neighbour’s tree on the far right until I looked at it on the computer later; I must have been too busy watching Leo’s joyful splashing right in front of my nose. 


There is one more April weekend coming up. Will it bring more snow? We would very much appreciate a stretch of warm, dry weather so that the snow will finally melt completely and the fields have a chance to dry up. Ideally we would start field work right now, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen before the 10th of May at the earliest, probably later. As much as we love our farming life, it is never free of anxiety and worries about factors we cannot control. Yet every year it works out somehow.  I guess we just have to follow the example of the geese: stay our course, and trust that we will raise our crop, just like every year.



Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Where in the world is Spring?





It is eleven pm, and Orion is low in the western sky already. It seems like just a short while ago that he rose in the east at midnight. Now, his feet will soon be touching the horizon, and he’ll start to slip away. This, at least, is a sure sign that the year is progressing and we are into spring, just like the much longer days. The sun set at 8:24 tonight, 13 ½ hours after it rose.

But what kind of spring is this? Right now the temperature sits at -12 Celsius, and there’s a good chance it will dip as low as last night, when it was -18. Daytime temperatures rose all the way up to -4 in the sunshine, and my weekly measurement of the average snow depth for Environment Canada showed 40 cm – five centimetres less than last week. Unlike last Monday, when everything was soft and slushy after almost a week of melting, I had no trouble with snow coming in at the top of my boots: it was cold enough that the snow easily carried my weight. 

Oh, we are all getting a bit tired of this! When we came home from our journey south a couple of weeks ago we had much more snow than when we left on the first day of March, but only a few days later I saw the first harbingers of spring. A familiar raucous cry made me look up in the Costco parking lot in the city, and indeed, there they were: four gulls, their gleaming white bodies in stark contrast to the deep blue sky. The same day a big flock of starlings lifted off our neighbour’s trees, only to settle down again right there, almost as if a wind gust had stirred them up. A day or two later we saw two geese flying overhead – there was no doubt that winter’s icy grip had been broken, or at least loosened. 

Temperatures soared to +8, a couple of times even +10, roads briefly became muddy, but soon cars were followed by the inevitable plume of dust. A big puddle appeared at the edge of the lawn, and water in our basement – all was as it should be. If the snow would continue to melt at this speed - not too slow, but not too fast either – it would be perfect. 

But of course it is never a good idea to project too far into the future, to conclude that weather might behave as expected, which means, of course, in most cases ‘as desired’. The middle of last week brought a marked drop in temperatures, and on Thursday and Friday it snowed. Fortunately predictions of up to 15 centimetres didn’t quite come true, but it was enough to cover the raggedy snow banks with an immaculately white blanket of new snow.


Ruefully we have returned to snowshoeing in the field instead of taking Leo on walks along the road. I’m sure he appreciates it, since he can run wherever he wants that way, and he doesn’t even break through the crusted surface of the old snow under the thin layer of new. Conditions are perfect for snowshoeing, actually, and we should probably simply enjoy it while it lasts. 

The starlings are still around, though I haven’t seen them join chickadees, redpolls, blue jays, woodpeckers and nuthatches at the feeder; they must have an alternate source of food, and of course this is nothing new for them. I feel for the geese, too, brave souls. Whatever might induce those first couples to break away from the main flock and seek out this bleak winter landscape where food is scarce? 

Pussy willows are not afraid of the snow either

But, as Emily Dickinson says in her poem, ‘It will be Summer – eventually’, and I can be patient a little longer. Tomatoes and basil have come up in their seed boxes in the sunny living room window, and the solar lanterns, some of them barely poking out of the snow beside the front deck, spread their glow for much of the night, a sure sign that the light has indeed returned. 


In the meantime, we will at least have enough wood for cozy evenings by the fire ...