February 28, 2007
to know which way the wind blows
I have spent the better part of this winter obsessively checking the National Weather Service Forecast Office's website - now bookmarked on my laptop. We plant people emerge from the dormancy of winter suddenly anxious for the proper weather to nurture our gardens and crops, fearful of too much or too little of the essential elements necessary for a timely bloom or surviving seedling. In this I am probably no less eccentric in my preoccupation than the farmers and gardeners of yore who relied upon the ancient celestial reckonings printed in their Almanacks to determine the timing of sowing and winnowing. Or to uncover a liar on the witness stand, as one country lawyer famously referenced his in the so-called "Almanac Trial". The witness, a Mr. Allen, claimed to have seen a murder committed in the dead of night at a considerable distance due to the brightness of the moon at that hour. The lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, Esq., whipped out an almanac from his briefcase to reference the time of moonset for that late August evening of 1857 in central Illinois as 12:03 a.m., just an hour after the witness claimed visibility by full moonlight. At this, the courtroom burst into laughter, and Lincoln passed his almanac to the jurors, who promptly aquitted his client.
Though the NWS employs satellites and computer models to determine the timing of a drop of rain or a sudden hailstorm, I am not convinced it is the gardener's only true device for knowing the weather. A quick check of NWS this morning reveals that "Lack of significant cloud cover along with the very cold airmass over the region has allowed temperatures to drop to near freezing in some of the interior valleys." Of course, I might only have walked out the back door to find that the skies are cloudless and it is cold - about 48 degrees by the reckoning of the rusting metal-spring thermometer on the garage wall.
Yesterday, though, a thundershower and hailstorm were predicted in the afternoon, leading me to lay protective screens over the $120 worth of tender new plants I had put in last week. Sure enough, at about 4pm there was one lightening strike, one clap of thunder (that startled the cat), and 5 minutes of hail. The plants survived.
