That Was the Winter That Was

The photo at left is of a snowstorm, Massachusetts style, 2012.  This is the winter of the Arctic Oscillation and La Nina.  It may well be the spring of few blooms.

Double-click on the image and you'll
see snow falling.  Unfortunately, it
melts as it hits the ground.  The red
arrow points to our snow 'pile'.

If you are reading this from Europe, you are doubtlessly saying, ‘feel free to take some of ours’, because Europe is having one of its coldest and snowiest winters on record, with Rome digging out from a once-in-a-century eight-inch blizzard and more northerly cities shivering from a never-ending Arctic blast.

Here in the Boston suburbs, we have had exactly seven inches of snow, and two of those inches fell in October.  We were supposed to get a measurable storm today.  One of the Boston newspapers even called Betty looking for a comment on its implications. 

But the predicted storm has fizzled.  The snow at 2,000 feet turns to rain as it hits the ground.  We have a wet driveway to show for it, and nothing else.  That tiny patch of white in the photo is the remnant of our January “storm”, and it’s only there because we pushed all the snow from the driveway into one pile.  Betty and I usually take bets along about now on when the last of the snow on the property will melt.  This year, the bet is off.

Rome gets snow, we get bupkis.

As everyone knows by now, this is all the result of the Arctic Oscillation.  The jet stream has pushed unusually far north and some poor town in Alaska has received 22 feet of snow.  Weaker Atlantic trade winds allow little pockets of cold air to descend into unusual places like, say, southern Italy, with the result that the Romans have snowball fights for the first time in living memory.

This would all be sour grapes except that New England gardens are likely to pay the price for this weather anomaly.  This morning, when I went out to get the newspaper, I found that yet another spring bulb had popped out of the ground – thrust up by the heaving of the earth caused, in turn, by the fact that the ground isn’t frozen down two feet like it ought to be.  I only saw the bulb because it’s a hyacinth, which the squirrels and rabbits won’t touch on a bet. 

The lack of frozen ground and snow means our trees will ‘pop’ weeks earlier than is good for them.  If the Arctic Oscillation dissipates and we get a couple of late season nor’easters, we’ll have branches and entire trees breaking over.  The perennials will have weakened roots because of the aforementioned heaving and will come up earlier.  That will require more soil moisture, and that’s exactly what we have a deficit of because of the lack of snow.

We will get through this, of course.  Plants are, for the most part, resilient.  But we breed plants today for their showy blooms and textured foliage, not for hardiness.  I suspect that by this fall, more than a few of our specimen shrubs will have gone to Plant Heaven.

No one said being a gardener was easy.  This winter – and the coming spring – we’ll find out just how difficult being a gardener really is.

Now Is the Winter of My Discontent

On the second day of this new year, I plunged into the woods that make up part of our property and sawed a very large tree limb into roughly a dozen pieces.  The limb – more accurately, about a third of a tree – fell during our brush with Irene back in late August, and we have a policy that “what falls in the woods stays in the woods” unless it interferes with the sight lines from one of our windows.

I will freely admit that when we first noticed the limb, I made some kind of vague commitment that I would “do something about it, eventually”, which is commonly understood to mean that it will still be on my “to do” list in 2030. 

That's me, a year ago today, clearing away the newest
foot of snow.  This morning, there's nothing but lawn.

For me, the saving grace of most such promises is the advent of winter.  Once there’s a foot of snow on the ground, outdoor chores are reduced to one or two bouts of cutting firewood.  The wonderful thing about a good, old-fashioned New England winter is that five months of Mother Nature acting on something as ephemeral as a tree limb eliminates the problem without me having to break a sweat.  Come next spring, the problem would have mostly solved itself.

But this is – at least so far – the snowless winter, except for a cruel October storm that raised all sorts of false hopes about record snowfalls (and left much of New England without power for a week).  All the autumn chores that I put off with the full expectation of getting a pardon once the snow pack was knee deep are still out there, beckoning me.  Instead of curling up with a book on New Year’s Day, I spent an hour cutting down the ornamental grasses that should, by all rights, have been flattened by now.  This is patently unfair.

And, if you remember back just one year, we all spent the week between Christmas and New Years digging out from a pair of back-to-back storms that dumped nearly three feet of the white stuff across the region.  Once that snow was in the record books, all I had to do was point to the snow banks and wince a little bit about having pulled a muscle wielding our snow blower, and I was excused from all chores.  I got a lot of reading (and writing) done last winter.

This year I walk out to the mailbox and see the pile of branches that really needs to get taken to the town dump.  Out back, there is a mat of leaves on walkways that ought to get raked so that moisture can better seep down into the ground.  The list of uncompleted autumn chores is endless.

Somewhere out there is an Alberta Clipper that is going to merge with some warm, muggy moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.  They’re going to collide somewhere over Pennsylvania and shoot northeast.  When that happens, we’re going to get buried.  I, for one, can’t wait.

And in the End...

The gardening season drew to an abrupt close last evening as snow began falling in Medfield.  Through this strange autumn of never-ending rain, we had escaped without a frost – something that can happen as early as mid-September and that almost always occurs before Columbus Day. 

This year, though we’re down to under ten hours a day of sunlight, nighttime temperatures stayed mostly in the 40s.  The result was scraggly annuals that were too tired and light-deprived to bloom, but green nonetheless.  But because they had not been hit by frost, we left in place several containers that were foliage-centric, including one I highlighted in September.

The first snow of the 2011-2012
season spelled the end of this
container.  That's New England.

Well, all that’s over.  The photo at left is of the same container, taken last evening as wet, heavy snow overspread the area.  And, naturally, there’s a forecast of a couple of inches of additional accumulation for the weekend.

We’ve spent the past three weeks preparing the gardens for this event.  The perennials have been cut down and, in some cases, divided (or given the heave-ho as in the case of bearded iris).  The compost bins are overflowing and barrels of diseased plant material have gone to the dump.  With the exception of some beds in the rear gardens, we’re ready.

This morning, though, I realize that I’m never fully prepared for the onset of winter.  Even though November is just a few days off, I keep expecting to eke out another week of pleasant temperatures; or at least to not have to bundle up just to go out and get the newspapers in the morning.  Last evening was a reality check.  This is New England.  Get used to it!

Driveway markers

We observed one of our solemn, annual rituals the other day: we put out the driveway markers.

We have fairly well exhausted the end-of-fall checklist. The leaves have been mowed and re-mowed into the lawn until they are a fine, brown mulch. The perennial beds have been cut flat and, depending upon whether the spindly, desiccated stalks showed evidence of mildew or not, the detritus has been either composted or taken to the dump.

Those autumn chores remind us that, once upon a time, there was color and life in our garden. By contrast, putting out the driveway markers serves only the purpose of acknowledging that winter is imminent. The sun will set today at 4:15, the third of an eleven-day run featuring that horrendously early departure of daylight. It rose this morning at 7:01 and, incredibly, has still another ten minutes of daylight to lose before the solstice. With just nine hours of daylight and nighttime temperatures sinking into the low twenties, all it will take is a little bit of moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico and the snows of winter will arrive with a vengeance.

The markers look odd for now; circles of bright red atop white poles. Because our driveway meanders 220 feet from the street to the garage (good feng shui, I imagine) and has a curving turnaround area, it takes 20 markers to indicate the true outline of the course. It’s a necessary exercise: not for the first snow but, rather, for the fourth or fifth. The first one (unless it’s a nor’easter) will melt in a day. The second one may linger a little longer but the demarcation between asphalt and lawn will still be obvious even under a few inches of snow.

It’s when we get six inches of snow followed by eight inches more that the reason for the markers becomes clear. The person pushing the snow blower follows the line of markers, left and right, throwing snow between two feet and ten depending upon how much moisture is in it (if you are a snow-shoveling veteran, you can skip this part). In wide areas of a driveway or where the house or shrubs are immediately adjacent, snow is thrown elsewhere on the driveway, then re-blown off on a subsequent pass. Each pass deposits snow in a slightly different location with the result that after a short while there is no longer a clear line between driveway and non-driveway. Without those markers as a guide, a snow blower will inevitably veer off into grass. The blades of the snow blower grind up the grass, killing it, while also typically snapping a shear pin. By mid-January, those markers are worth their weight in hot chocolate.

We also are sticklers for cleaning right to the edge of the driveway. This is a matter of personal preference for some New Englanders (I have seen driveways plowed exactly the width of a car and not an inch more). Betty’s strongly held view is that snow or ice left on a driveway is bound to melt and re-freeze. Getting it all off as soon as it snows is the one way to keep the driveway clear all winter.

And, it all starts with those markers. And the markers start now, in early December.