Snow, Record Cold, Hail, Storms, Twisters: We Just Can't Have Nice Things

Springtime killed. Amid a dusting of snow, the sagging blooms and
the dark color leaves on these daffodils in my yard indicate
they might have been destroyed by the frigid temperatures. Photo was
taken while temperatures were still well below freezing. The
damage will probably be more apparent later. 

In the grand scheme of things, the losses and potential losses I found outside my house in St. Albans, Vermont this morning were pretty small.

But they were still disheartening.

I kind of expected it, but it was a shame to see the daffodils and other plants and flowers that had been coming up likely ruined by the intense cold from last night.

If any of them survived, they won't tonight as temperatures are likely to be in even colder tonight. I'll know at the end of the week what, if anything, survived. I have a feeling I won't even get to enjoy lilacs this year. Those buds could be damaged, too.  

Who knows? Maybe most of the plants will recover.  But I'm not optimistic at this point.

Amid everything that has been going on, it was nice to get some peace in my gardens from the early season blooms. Now those are gone, at least for now. So that was taken from me.  Everything had been coming up, so I don't know what kind of flowers and blooms I get later in the spring or summer.

Well, there's always next year.

As if to add insult to injury, as I started to write this, snow began to briefly fall pretty heavily. The sickening winter sound of a snow plow scraping by bothered me, too. There's not much snow, but it's blowing around and making the roads slick. It's not the usual April wet snow. It's powdery. Roads are frozen. Like January. Ugh.

At last check it was 18 degrees up in Saranac Lake, New York. The "warmest" parts of Vermont were in the upper 20s early this morning.  Snow covered the ground across most of northern Vermont, and I'm sure gardeners statewide found the same depressing sight out their doors that I did this morning.

Tonight, Vermont is in for record or near record cold. The record low tomorrow morning in Burlington is 23 degrees and in Montpelier it's 21 degrees. Those records are in jeopardy. Some areas of the Northeast Kingdom will probably be in the mid-teens tonight. A few places up there might not even get above freezing today.

Again, my "suffering" isn't that at all. Just a little disappointment. But you can't help but think the weather has gotten pretty mean-spirited.

I can't attribute today's weather to climate change.  It could be random, and you really can't take one weather event in one little spot on the globe and point at climate change.

However,  in a perverse way, it's consistent with it. We've been warned by scientist - as I recall since the late 1980s at least - we were heading toward a future that was generally warmer, but with a higher risk of sharp day to day jolts in temperatures and weather conditions. We were warned of warmer temperatures interrupted by sharp, damaging cold spells. That future is here.

Like what has been happening in lots of places, increasingly in recent years, things get going early in the spring due to oddly warm temperatures. Then an old fashioned quick freeze comes and ruins everything.

For me this year, it was just a bummer. For many agricultural interests in much of the eastern United States, this will be a disaster at a time they really don't need anothe disaster.

Freeze warnings are up for a broad area of the Middle Atlantic States, with temperatures likely to reach the 20s as far south as Virginia. Orchards and early crops in this region are in big trouble.

SEVERE STORMS

Gigantic hailstones came down overnight near
Devol, Oklahoma. Photo via Twitter/KOCO

And, as I've mentioned practically every day this month, severe storms keep rolling on.  Here's the latest update.

Those severe storms in the Middle Atlantic States certainly materialized.  Though tornadoes were not expected, one might have hit Toms River, on the Jersey shore. There's a lot of damage to trees and some houses, there, so the weather folks will probably investigate that today.

There was a tornado warning at one point for pretty intense rotation on the Bronx/Yonkers border yesterday afternoon, ut I don't know if anything actually touched down.

Yesterday, overnight and this morning, large hail, sometimes baseball sized, pelted parts of Oklahoma.

Tornadoes are in the forecast today for a broad area centered on where Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana meet. The tornado threat will spread into much of the rest of the Southeast tomorrow.

Back up here in Vermont, we're not expecting any severe weather. The frigid weather is enough, thank you. Although it will warm up somewhat starting tomorrow afternoon, it looks like it's going to stay colder than normal into early May.

If any of our garden plants can grow back, they'll have to wait awhile.

It's Foliage Season In Vermont!

My idea of Vermont foliage season. A springtime view last
year in Franklin County. 

No, despite the headline in this post, I haven't gone off the deep end. I fully understand it's spring, not autumn.

But really, we've hit what I consider the nicer of the two foliage seasons in Vermont. The one where the landscape comes to life in an explosion of green and blooms. As in right now.

I say this every year in May, but I have no idea why the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing doesn't promote this time of year like they do the traditional fall foliage season.

True the Vermont tourism web page currently has a gorgeous spring view, but still.

Maybe it's just as well. I can enjoy the scenery without rubbing elbows with too many lost tourists.

Yes, fall foliage here is gorgeous, and perhaps a bit more multi-colored than the spring foliage. However, it's hardly monochromatic out there at the moment. There's every shade of green imaginable in the buds and new leaves, and it seems to change by the minute.

Yesterday was a great example. We had near summer-like warmth in the afternoon, and the woods responded. When I drove to work early Monday morning in the northern Champlain Valley, the landscape was mostly brown with splashes of green.

By the time I drove back home in the late afternoon, the landscape was green was spots of lingering early spring brown.

Plus it's fascinating in the spring to watch the green start on the ground, in the grass, in the lowest elevations, then climb into the trees, and then climb the slopes of the soon-to-be aptly named Green Mountains.

There's other wonderful colors, of course. Pops of white shadbush blooms are emerging in the forests. Patches of white and pink trillium are about to create throw rugs of blooms on patches of wet forest floors.

It was cool and damp most of this spring, and that was great for the forsythia and daffodils. These yellow blooms almost glow in the dark they're so brilliant. I don't know a friendlier face than a happy looking daffodil bobbing gently back and forth in the breeze. Soon, meadows will be polka dotted with thousands of dandelion blooms. Who can resist that?

And it keeps coming. Next up, pink and purple crabapple trees will pop out, and lilacs. Those glorious, aromatic lilacs.  It's impossible for me to walk down a street without sticking my face and nose into every lilac bloom I encounter on my trip.

Speaking of aromas, have you ever really smelled the air this time of year, especially on a rainy or humid evening? It's a gorgeous, rich organic smell, punctuated by the sweetness of blooming flowers.

The sounds you hear this time of year are about as pleasant as you can get, too. This time of year when I take the dogs outside at dawn, we're treated to the happy sound of robins greeting the morning, and the DEE-DEE of chickadees debating each other in opposing trees.

Like every season, spring in Vermont does have its drawbacks. The black flies swarming in your face are unpleasant to say the least. You also can't go hiking in the woods and mountains. It's too muddy and wet.

But we'll take it. Amid the bitter winds and deep snow of early March, when we've already endured winter for months, I often ask myself, "Why do I live in Vermont?"

I get my emphatic answer when I walk out the door into the explosively re-awakening new green landscape.

El Nino Makes Barren Chilean Desert Bloom Gorgeously

The Atacama Desert in Chili is normally one of the most desolate places on Earth.

It's on the east side of the Andes mountains, and is pretty much blocked from any moisture that wants to sneak in from the Pacific Ocean.

Moisture from places like the Amazon, and the Atlantic Ocean way, way, way off to the east are also blocke by moisture.

So the Atacama desert is barren. It's one of the driest places on Earth. In many places in this desert, you can go years without measureable rain. There are actually little sections of this desert where it hasn't rained in 400 years! 

However, during a very strong El Nino, the kind we are having now, the ocean on the Chilean coastt warms, which encourages particularly strong storms to form near that Chilean coast.

The strong storms then allow some moisture to force its way over the mountains into the Atacama desert, and it will rain a little in parts of what looks like a wasteland.

Then a miracle happens. According to the Bored Panda web site this is what happens in those rare occasions when it rains:

"The flowers 'hibernating' beneath its surface suddenly bloom with an explosion of color, eager to take advantage of the rain.'

The Atacama desert then turns into a flowery psychelic paradise, as the photos in this post from Bored Panda indicate. (Click on the pics to make them bigger and easier to enjoy.)

Daniel Diaz, the National Tourism Service director in Atacama said in 2015, this bloom has happened twice in the same year, whih has never been seen in recorded history.

I'll just enjoy the photos of the flowers, and for once in my life, I'll wish I was in the Atacama desert.