Almost breakup season

[greenstorm]

The ditch steamers came by yesterday, unfreezing the ditches where culverts went under the road and such. It rained. Now there's a rivulet the thickness of my wrist flowing down through the pond area over the ice; it leaps onto the grass across the path and then dives under the snow again and is busily filling up the back dip behind the gate. The dogs spent the night indoors because ugh.

The winter pig field, on a south slope, has thawed. It's become a transmitting slope for the wood field, which is flat and just uphill and thus is still melting and sending its flow down through the pigpen to join the pond. So far the pigpen isn't deep mud; I need to open up the fence to the wood field so they can go lighter on it. also I will toss down my cardboard to stabilize the soil a bit and get mechanically broken down by their feet so it composts quickly.

I can see soil on the steepest of my southern slopes around the haskaps.

A vast host of swans has flown overhead, stopping to rest on the fields one town over and then on the open corner of the lake where it outflows into the river.

The road bans are on.

Spring is nigh.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

breakup season refers to ice breaking up?

it snowed here this morning! about an inch. everywhere in the metro area & points north. of course it's gone now. but it was quite a treat to wake up to, especially at the end of March! it's been years since we had a spring snow this late. used to be a feature of the old climate.

[greenstorm]

It's a term they use up here for the time the ice is coming off the lake.

It's funny because after the long winter of being somewhat confined with folks I suspect there's an element of the other too.

Yay moisture! We had rain the other day, real rain that wasn't misty or snowy but actually big raindrops with windshield wipers needed and everything. Seems like a swap of temperatures.

[yarrowkat]

neat! and yeah, i bet there is some of both kinds of breakup.

we got 1/10" rain over the course of about 18 hours, and then a bit of blustery wind, and i woke up this morning to an inch of snow! it was frozen onto the branches of trees & stems of grasses, which is also unusual here due to the relative temperature of things. when i left the farm this morning, it had just warmed up enough that flakes and clumps of snow were starting to sift down from the treetops.

[greenstorm]

I love that morning falling-of-snow; here it happens as the sunrise line moves across everything. Such a feeling of well-being.

1/10" of rain is so tiny! Is that a lot for you? I think that during our ("the coast") flood last fall we had 12" of rain fall in a day in a couple areas, which of course was pretty bad but still.

Everything is still a creek here. The water is sinking nicely into the ground, ready to be drawn on later.

[yarrowkat]

a tenth of an inch is not a lot, but it is my measure for a decent rain. less than that, and your shoes scuff dirt with every footstep under the thin veneer of moisture, and i can't really call that a rain, even if it smells overpoweringly of rain. at a tenth, it actually soaks in and the plants perk up.

12" is our average annual rainfall! in a really wet year we'll get maybe 14". we get some inch-an-hour storms in the summer, sometimes/rarely up to 2-3" in a storm (one notable storm about a decade ago brought 6" and high winds; that storm still gets talked about.)

"everything is a creek" feels like a line of poetry.

[greenstorm]

Everything is a creek/I thought I'd found peace but it was only/winter,/temporarily freezing.

[yarrowkat]

i love this

[greenstorm]

Me too! thank you for finding it.

[greenstorm]

One of the things my bones had forgotten from the coast was the way a misty drizzle settles down. If the ground was dry it would never wet it, but the ground is never dry so it never really matters. Up here all rain actually really is water that makes things wet.

I think of that moist-film-over-dust as being disturbed by the first big fat raindrops leaving craters in its surface, or as the result of dew.

[greenstorm]

...dew is probably not a big thing there, I imagine.

[yarrowkat]

it happens! like fog, it's an early early morning phenomenon in very specific weather conditions, vanishing not long after sunrise, and one has to run out with a camera and catch it really fast.

[greenstorm]

It strikes me that going outside barefoot is probably way better there than here.

[yarrowkat]

provided that nothing stabby is in one's immediate environment, and that the daytime temp is not over 90F that day, absolutely. the desert does have this quality of biting you before you can bite it, if you're not alert. and the ground will burn your feet to blisters in the sun in the summer. do you have goathead vines up there? tribulus terrestris.

[greenstorm]

Oh, hey, right, you have all those sharp plants.

I'm not sure if we do or not, I've never had to deal with it here. And on the coast we had blackberries, and everywhere we have devils club and stinging nettles, but those aren't just... lying around most yards, exactly.

[greenstorm]

Well, stinging nettles are I guess.

[yarrowkat]

nettles are definitely an ouch! goathead thorns have some kind of irritant on them, so you step on it, the thing punctures your foot because it's hard as a rock, and then it smarts for days. they're sneaky, because they look like a flat mat of green with pretty yellow flowers and then secretly the whole mat is full of thorns. you can't ride a bike anywhere here with out a puncture repair kit because of these things.

the farm was free of them for years (full of horse nettle - solanum eleganafolium, also beautiful and medicinal and poisonous and extremely thorny, but much less likely to reach out and attack you), and then maybe 2-3 years ago goatheads started showing up in odd spots. i think tracked in by the dog.

[yarrowkat]

rain that actually makes things wet is the holy grail. it definitely happens! but so often the rain is actually just a spattering of drops and a lovely scent, or just enough to wet the top of the soil and no more. i have encountered the weather known as a mizzle, in Seattle, and found it novel and slightly fascinating.

we'll get a spatter of rain, and the car will actually be dirtier, from all the dust the drops kicked up in landing.

[squirrelitude]

Ditch steamer! That's a thing I've never heard of before.

What are road bans?

[greenstorm]

Yes, it was new to me too. Because the surface thaws first and the culverts are underground in shade, they're a normal part of spring: hot steam that thaws them, then they take care of themselves.

Road bans are a restriction on the weight of vehicles allowed on non-highway roads: side roads made of asphalt, like mine, and gravel or calciumed forestry roads. In winter the roads are frozen so they're structurally good; in summer the substrate is dry and they're structurally good. In spring especially, the substrate on asphalt and the whole road on calcium and gravel road is saturated and heavy vehicles really tear them up. Right now deep ruts are forming in the highways, tire tracks that make vehicle handling a little iffy; those other roads are built to lower standards so they hold up much less well.

Usually the signs say "50% of maximum axle weight" or sometimes 70%.