Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts

Thursday, December 23

Mother Nature is messing with us again

She fooled the imports, now she’s messin’ with the natives. Shown above are white oak, miners lettuce, and stinging nettles. Normally they wait for springtime before they appear with new foliage. Right now we are exactly one day into winter!

The flowering quince and lemon tree aren’t native, so they can be fooled into thinking that when there’s abundant rain and sunlight and warm weather it’s time to put out new leaves and maybe even flowers.

Before the recent week-long rain siege came to California, we were finishing up a wood-splitting marathon down the road a ways. I noticed new leaves sprouting on a huge old white oak tree; it was a major abundance of leaves, too.

Are we going to get the usual frosty mornings this winter? We’ve had just one morning that iced up a bowl of water. Apple trees require a period of very cold weather in order to produce fruit. Luckily we don’t have apple trees, so take that Mother Nature!

Tuesday, April 13

Winter hangs on…

When will it end? It’s time for blossoms and bees and new shoots on the trees. This morning when I went over to feed the two old horses, I decided to return to the house the long way. I walked up the road past a flatbed trailer and noticed that the surface had a peculiar sparkle to it. ICE! It was covered with frost! In mid-April! What’s going on here?! For the past day it’s been raining, and over roughly a 24-hour period we got 1.8" (46mm) which came mostly by drizzle punctuated with downright scary downpours. At one point the water coming off the roof where there is no rain gutter made it difficult to see the valley to the south. A thunderstorm late yesterday afternoon pelted the blossoms and tender new leaves with sheets of hail. It’s tough being a tree in weather like this. If I had been braver and willing to get soaked (and risk wasting a nice camera by drenching it), I could have taken pictures of gopher holes down the hill gushing water. I watched, hoping to catch sight of a thoroughly soaked gopher popping out, but no luck. Oh well, at least it didn’t snow.