The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

Rain, rain go away, and come back in July and August when you are really needed for my garden’s sake. It is June already and that fickle spring with all its rain should be passing instead of hovering over the Pacific Northwest with its dark clouds.

I need to plow and plant. I have peppers straining in their six packs to get into the ground. There are eggplant, spinach, cabbage and onion starts getting too big for their pots. I am yet to plant my corn, beans, beets and a host of other things the good earth gives us to eat.

I have tried for weeks to farm in a wet suit, but the mud cakes so heavily on my boots that I can hardly move from one location to another. At times like this I turn to the Old Farmer’s Almanac to see what’s ahead on the weather front.

Oh, hum, it appears more of the same. It said April and early May will be cooler and wetter than normal, with little sunshine.  You got that right forecaster, but then OFA said the remainder of May will be warmer and drier than normal. Since we had hail on Friday and rain everyday for weeks, that makes a guy lose confidence in the weatherman, especially when it is predicted that the hottest temperatures will occur in early to mid-June. Yet in the next report it said this weekend would be cool accompanied by showers. Enough already.

The summer season, it said, will feature abundant sunshine, with above-normal temperatures and below-normal rainfall. The hottest temperatures, it predicted, will occur in early July, and early August. September and October will be cooler than normal, with below-normal rainfall in September and above-normal rainfall in October.

You don’t really need to go to Las Vegas, Reno or down the road to an Indian casino to gamble. Just become a farmer.

Every day is a crap shoot.

Farmers have been gambling on the weather long before weather forecasters adopted sophisticated computer and satellite forecasting. I am not sure those old farmer methods weren’t just as accurate.

The breastbone of a goose was often used to tell if there would be a harsh winter. As the breastbone dried, it would change color. If the dried breastbone was white, it would be a mild winter. If the tips turned purple with would be a cold spring. If the bone turned mostly black, purple of blue, it would be a cold winter.

In weather predicting lore, there was a saying "A ring around the Moon is a sure sign of rain." The saying "It smells like rain," is a true fact because precipitation is accompanied by low pressure and rising air. These combined conditions cause air and gases in the ground to let out a musty smell just before it rains.

We all know about Groundhog Day (Feb. 2) as a weather prediction about winter, but oddly it started in Pennsylvania by German immigrant farmers who back in the old country watched as the badger emerged from hibernation. It the badger came out on a cloudy day it would not see his shadow and that heralded the beginning of spring. Problem with that is, there were few badgers in Pennsylvania, so the farmers adopted the groundhog. Statistically, he has been wrong 70 percent of the time.

Buys Ballot, a professor at the Utrecht, Holland university, in 1857 said that standing with the back to the wind, meant low pressure is to the left and high pressure is to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and the reverse is true in the Southern Hemisphere. He is right. The effect is due to the Coriolis force a law that is still accepted today as one of meteorology’s major principles.

Question is, who will tell me when Mother Earth is ready for my peppers?

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470 or via e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.