Broken record

Reporting on the local climate makes one sound like a broken record. Same phrase over and over: “It’s different every year.”

But I have to keep saying that, because it’s true.

This winter was different from each preceding winter, and spring is coming in with its own flavor, too.

The winter of 2014–15 was a whopper for many areas, and broke numerous records. Here it was just a normal Vermont winter, with the old-timers saying it was more like the ones back when than recent years. The only record we came close to was Coldest February (ranked #3 according to those who keep track).

Yes, there have been snowier winters, colder ones, longer ones, icier ones, drier ones. What stood out this year was the mix and match (as reported in my February entry, “A big winter”). In contrast, it’s ending benignly, easing into spring with a gentle thaw. While the weather improvement on a daily basis is frustratingly slow, it allows the snow to melt gradually so that flooding is either absent or mild, and dirt roads are slimy instead of axle-deep mires, and ice-out is a rising rush instead of a torrent that causes ice dams.

People keep saying, “When is spring going to get here?” By my observations, it’s already arrived. Spring isn’t so much when the grass turns green and flowers bloom, but when the environment changes from hard to soft, and the birds start returning and hibernating critters emerge. The migratory birds are right on time, starting with the song sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, and robins. Coons, skunks, and squirrels are out foraging, and no doubt the bears will make an appearance shortly. So will the daffodils and crocuses.

I’ve noticed from my informal recordkeeping that the songbirds and bulbs appear reliably within a two-week window. This year they’re on the late side because the snowpack has been slow to shrink. As soon as that noticeably began, however, in came the migrants, and now the morning is filled with twittering and singing instead of frigid silence. In our first 48 hours above freezing, we lost almost half the snow cover and gained multiple species.

So even though every year is different, the season cycle is comfortingly the same. Global climate change is showing trends that we’ve noticed over thirty years, but as long as the planet remains driven by sunlight and tilted at the same angle, we can count on what goes around coming around again.

Winter garden

I’ve lost track of how many years it’s been since I’ve been growing red bell peppers and tomatoes in my living room. At least a decade now.

This practice arose from three things: (1) a very short growing season, (2) learning that peppers and tomatoes are perennials in tropical climes, and (3) having a south-facing living room wall that’s all windows.

So one spring, when I bought transplants for the garden, I kept one tomato and two peppers inside and planted them in big pots. They have provided produce year-round ever since.

I also tried dragging one of my EarthBox containers inside at an early frost, just when the red bell peppers were ripening for harvest. (Kitty helped.) They produced into December.

For the year-rounders, all I give them is water and occasional refreshing of soil. The plants have always been brittle, since they don’t grow against wind and rain, and each year they give more leaves and fewer, smaller fruit. I cut them back every few months, and they crank up again.

Finally I killed one from too much sun and/or too little water and/or cutting back too severely. So I replaced it the next spring, and on it goes. The longest-lived one has been about seven years. All would go indefinitely if I treated them better.

So this season, I upgraded my ritual to include twice-a-month feedings. Too soon to tell what that will lead to. I’m looking forward to spring, when I can replace the tomato with a bush variety that will not take off across the living room and up the walls.

Even with sparse output, you can’t beat having fresh tomatoes and peppers when it’s ten below!

A big winter

Here in Vermont, in our peculiar dip between the northern and southern ranges of the Green Mountains, where the Taconic Hills peter out, we define winter as the non-growing season when it’s probable to have snow on the ground. This can last three to seven months, averaging four to five.

Some years we have a cold winter. Others, a dry one. A snowy one. An icy one. A wet one. Pick your dominant characteristic.

This year we’re having a big one: big snow, big cold, big ice, big wind. It started in November and looks likely to run into April. Most everyone is going nutty, because when we have the big snow—great for skiers and snowmobilers—it’s often too bitter to go outside. When temps moderate, it’s too icy to do anything requiring traction. When it’s cold enough, long enough, to make good lake ice, there’s a solid mass of snow atop it. The mix and match get out of sync, leaving the effect of just...plain...yuck.

It’s been a big winter, too, for other areas. Our region may be renown for the season, but this year other areas are getting the worst of it. Our two feet of snow has been three—four—five—somewhere else. In the worst ice storm, we lost power for three days while others suffered for a week. When we’ve gotten winds that ripped covers off woodpiles and shattered plastic storm windows, others have had roofs ripped off or tidal surges that destroyed their coastlines.

If you’ve got to have winter, it pays to be rural. We get to see the beauty. Sensual, unbroken white across the countryside, turned surreally blue under moonlight on the rare clear night, during which we can also see the Milky Way and constellations. And wildlife keeps reminding us that the season is marching on. Chickadees, for instance, have been making their “spring” call since December. A few weeks ago, the ravens began their courtship dances. This month the owls start theirs: invisible in the dusk and dark, but louder and louder with their monkey-like whooping and cackling. Then, because there’s no competition from artificial lighting, we can see the extra minutes of light added to every day.

This serves, of course, to make us chafe against the unrelenting weather. But at least we have assurance that it will end, which always seems to come sooner than we expect.

Green vs. white

For reasons I can’t fathom (which means they’re probably economical and political), someone decided that Rutland was going to be the Solar Capital of Vermont and a leader in solar power in New England, the United States, and who knows, probably the world.

I can’t fathom this because our region, of which Rutland is center of commerce, has so little sun. I can’t find firm statistics to support this, but compared to other regions we have cloudy skies well more than half the time. My own fifteen years of trying to garden here move me to claim that we don’t have sun most of the time.

(Even my physician supports this. When I asked how much vitamin D I should take along with my calcium, she said there was no upper limit because Vermont just doesn’t have enough sun to worry about it.)

So. For the past two years, we’ve been seeing solar farms popping up all over. The nearest one fills an old farm field on my way into Rutland to shop. Whoever used to own that land, or still does and is leasing it, is probably making way more money than they ever did farming. Same goes for people with bony hills that are now home to cell towers.

These things are ugly, but I’d sure rather see them than housing developments. Which is the last I thought about it until today.

In the past six days, we spent three of them with no power, thanks to a winter storm that knocked down lines throughout the state. Some areas were so damaged that they’ve spent all six days without juice. The entire period has been sunless. We are forecast for partly sunny for a day and a half starting tomorrow, then the next weather system moves in for two–three days. A fairly normal pattern.

Which is why I was thinking about it today. As I drove to the supermarket, along miles of road lined with bowed-over trees so saturated with white that it looked like they’d been blasted by a snow gun, gleaming against gunmetal-gray sky, I passed the solar farm. The arrays all had their backs to me, so I couldn’t see whether they were snow-pasted as well, though I did see some dump piles at their feet which suggested that they had shed their load.

Point is, what power were they collecting? What power were they making? Acres of field with nothing to do. To the best of my knowledge, these are grid-tie systems, so there’s no huge battery bank storing the power they create on nice days to help us out on the bleak ones. I was looking at a giant field of dormant, expensive hardware.

What good is solar power when the grid infrastructure is broken? If we’d had to rely on solar to keep us going during the outage, well, we’d be very cold and would have lost a lot of food and had to poop in the woods, not to mention been unable to do the work that enables us to pay the power bills. The biggest blessing of our outage experience was that the village store had power so we could get fuel to keep our generator going until it nigh melted down. Good-old evil fossil fuel, the same stuff the store was using to keep their generators going.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d get a propane generator because that fuel is more reliable than ethanol-blended gasoline, and doesn’t destroy small engines. Still, it’s a fossil fuel. Looking ahead in time to a “green” future, what’s going to keep us going when the grid is down? Tell me solar, and I will laugh in your face.

One can argue that the millions invested in solar arrays might be better invested in putting the grid underground so we don’t suffer days or weeks of economic upheaval every time Nature throws us a curveball. But that would still leave the macro problem of global depletion of fossil fuel, so green alternatives must be pursued.

Too bad they’re not worth a damn for year-round, all-climate reliability!

The Did/Didn’t list

Not living in the lake-effects part of the country, we dodged the early Big Snow bullet that just hit Buffalo. (Condolences to you folks.)

But living in the hilly northeast snow belt, we hear the clock ticking loudly as more days than not bring precipitation, with temps that more often than not fail to rise above freezing. Already we’ve had sleet, snow, freezing rain, and wet rain. The ground, though currently bare, is frozen solid. The pond has iced over. Any day now will be the last day we can do anything outside.

By “anything” I mean chores, which at this time of year means covering up and/or repositioning and/or putting away. It’s always a race against the calendar while frantically prioritizing a long list.

We did get twelve-plus cords of firewood stacked and covered, though owing to communication problems over the summer it all arrived late, and much is still so green we’ll be making more smoke than heat for months.

We didn’t buck, split, and stack the four big maples that came down on their own last year—they still lie where they fell—but did split and stack two-thirds of the massive white pine that a neighbor blocked and delivered, and got the rest of the chunks rolled onto pallets and de-barked. They will be great firewood next year.

We did get the garden and planters cleared, and the garlic planted and mulched; but didn’t keep up with the strawberry bed over the summer so it is hopelessly grassed over. We decided to disassemble it and restore lawn in its place, but didn’t get to that so have to wait until spring.

We did get the deck cleared (furniture, grill, rain barrels), which is necessary because those items are targets for the winter roof dump. We didn’t get the roof fixed, or the deck itself torn down, both of which are nearing critical condition and will rise to the top of next year’s priority list.

(But we did get the guys installing underground fiber-optic to pile, in a convenient spot, all the boulders they had to remove from the road in order to bury the cable. So when the deck does come down, we’ll have the raw materials on hand to replace it with a terrace.)

And while we did get the project and service vehicles secured where they need to be, we didn’t put away any ladders, so they may end up frozen in place until spring.

We did dig out half the out-of-control perennial bed, finding new homes for almost all the plants, but didn’t get the remaining soil relocated to where it needs to go for next year.

We didn’t get snow tires on my car yet, but did get them on the truck—just in time. Both vehicles need heavy service so it’s a coin toss as to what gets done first, on which, and when.

Et cetera.

It doesn’t help to be losing daylight at an accelerating rate. Which leads to another annual ritual: the countdown to solstice. Only 27 more days until the cycle reverses and days start getting longer.

Tick, tick, tick . . . meanwhile, the mad scramble to get hatches battened down, and everything tucked in.