The winter of 2012 has been anomalous here in southeast Michigan.  Warm, warm, warm.  All winter long.  It’s a little frightening, knowing how we need cold freezes to kill back certain pest species, to reset the clocks for certain plant and crop species.  It’s a little frightening, knowing how temperatures help regulate tree bud production, so that they don’t erupt too early and the little fruits get frozen off by late cold snaps.

But I’m a science guy.  I wanted to know HOW warm it’s been.  Is it my imagination, or did January feel more like February?  Did we just skip January’s weather altogether?  I want data!

So I got some data.  Bottom line: We did skip January.  And more.  Let’s go over things a bit, starting in December and running til March 11, when I started gathering this data (hence, my spreadsheets stop there, unless I do an update sometime in the future).

About the Data:

I went online, and used a variety of sources.  Because there are lots of sources to choose some, including some very local ones (like the Adrian Airport, just a few miles south), it was tough.  But in the end I chose to report on weather station KDTW, which is at the Detroit Metro Airport, because it has a long historical record (back to 1874).  And this report is not so much about our precise weather at Dragonwood, so much as about the weather all of us here in the Midwest have been through of late.  I downloaded daily temperatures and made plots.  You could do this too.

Perspective:

Let’s look at a graph of southeast Michigan year-round average temperatures.

What do we see? In round numbers,

1. Summer peak daily average temp is around mid-70s.

2. Winter peak daily average temp is around mid-20s.  This is about 50°F lower than the summer.

3. In the fall and spring months, temperatures fall and rise quickly, about 10-12°F each month in Sep-Nov, and Mar-May.

What we don’t see?  How much monthly variety there is from year to year. Answer? Not that much.  The majority of months average within 2-3°F of their long-term average.  It’s a fairly rare month that is as much as 4-5°F above or below average.  On the average, roughly 80% of months fall within about 4-5°F of the normal, leaving those extra warm or extra cold months as outliers in the top or bottom 10% of records.

Example: this past November 2011 at KDTW, average temps were 46.6°F, which was 5.1°F above normal.  That was the 5th highest November average temperature in 130+ years of record keeping.  So November was really warm, as Novembers go.

Quick Overview:

Warm winter.  Really warm.

December: 5.4°F above normal (12th warmest on record):

So, what do we see?  First, the “normal” green solid line is the mean average temperature across the month, just like the imaginary line down the middle of the annual graph for KDTW up above.  Just eyeballing it, you can see that the average December “normal” temperature is about 30°F.

The daily data is the three wiggly lines representing daily high, low and mean (average) temperatures for last December.  Again, it’s easy to see that it was a warm December.  I’ve added a “2012 averaged” red dashed line that is a rough estimate of how much warmer than normal the month was.  Detail: it’s an 11-day moving average line, meaning the value represents the average of that day plus those of 5 days before it and the 5 days after it.  For the month as a whole, we averaged 5.4°F above normal (normal is 30.1°F).

January: 5.1°F above normal (17th warmest on record):

January average daily mean temp is 25.6°F.  January 2012 however averaged 30.7°F, a good bit higher.  In fact, astute readers will note that the January average temperature was actually just a tad warmer than the normal December is supposed to be.

We skipped January, in weather terms.

February: 4.5°F above normal (12th warmest on record):

February is normally almost as cold as January: just 3°F warmer, averaging 28.1°F.  But this February was a whopping 32.6°F, again being warmer than the average December, let alone Jan or Feb.

March: ??°F above normal (?th warmest on record):

March normal average temp is 36.9°F at KDTW.  So far we’re well above that, and the month is nearing the halfway mark, with nothing but warm weather forecast.  Normally, this is maple sap weather, with nice warm days, but good freezes on most nights.  And you can see two good freezes, the second one around March 9-10.  But that looks like the end of our season.  Without further nightly freezes, there’s no sap to flow from our sugary friends, and with extra warm days the maple buds get ready to bloom and end the season altogether.

Note: Observant readers will note that I can’t have a valid red-dashed moving average line for the March 6-11 end of the graph, because I would need data from March 12-17 in order to calculate it.  So just ignore this… I’ll post an update in April with the full month of data for March.

Quick Look at the Region:

Here’s a look at December temperatures across the US.  The top map is mean temperature: SE Michigan is running about 35, and it’s the expected cold-in-the-North pattern.  But it’s the second map below that shows what it means.  For each tiny point on the map, the colors indicate how much warmer or colder the area was in December compared to “normal” years (monthly mean temps).   In short high numbers (red and brownish colors) mean hotter than normal temperatures.  Roughly two thirds of the country had a hotter than normal December.  The Dakotas and Minnesota were about the hottest.

There are other maps for the other months, but this post is too long already.  Go look them up yourself in the links below.  Short story: we stayed hot.

Summary:

I think the best way to look at this winter so far is this:  Spring has been shifted backward nearly a month.  It’s mid March now, the peepers are peeping madly, the robins woke us up this morning, the crocuses are well displayed, and I got buzzed by a honey bee yesterday.  This is all a bit early for us.

On the plus side: the deer had an easy winter, and didn’t chew up our young fruit tree branches like usual.

On the flip side: the fruit trees might bud too early and get nipped by a “normal” frost (ie., if the fruit trees bud early, it doesn’t have to be a “late” frost to nip the buds.  Even a regular frost can do the job.

There’s probably fifty plus and minuses we could do here, but I’m done.

Enjoy the nice weather.

Postscript:

As I post this it’s March 13, and we’re clearly in a very warm spell that will kill our maple season.  No freezes since last Friday, none in the forecast.  So the maple sap run will definitely be over for us… hope you got started early this year (our maples started dripping in late January! we got tapped on February 4, two weeks earlier than ever for Dragonwood).  I’ll follow up with a full March report later, in April.  Remind me if you don’t see it.

Oh!  And don’t forget if you haven’t been there, the USDA released their new Plant Hardiness Map a few weeks ago (here’s a write-up about it from Mother Jones), and it’s interactive this time, click to get your own state map.  Our farm?  Surprise!  We’ve moved from Zone 5 to Zone 6 (a more southern, warmer zone).  Here’s the direct link to the map at the USDA.

Data Reference Links:

1. US Temperature Anomaly Map (from NOAA):
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/tanal/temp_analyses.php

2. Monthly Climate Report For DTW Airport, Detroit (by NOAA; 12 months available):
http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=DTW&product=CLM&format=CI&version=1&glossary=0

3. Seasonal Weather Averages Plot (available for many localities, from Weather Underground):
http://www.wunderground.com/NORMS/DisplayNORMS.asp?AirportCode=KDTW&SafeCityName=Southgate&StateCode=MI&Units=none&IATA=DTW&MR=1

4. History Data (Weather Underground) - really powerful ability to bring up nice graphs of the temperature and other weather facts for just about anywhere in the U.S., with customizable date ranges.  BETTER YET: at the bottom of each page is a tabular version of the data, and a link to get it all as CSV (comma separated variables) that you can plug into a spreadsheet, like Open Office (what I used):
http://www.wunderground.com/history/

5. Historical local daily averages and record high/low temps (NOAA) - this is for DTW Airport, but other places and other dates are available.  Look around:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/display_climate.php?file=records_DTW_Dec_inc.htm

6. NOAA Climate data from all over the U.S. - this is the site that leads you to #5 above.  Just click an area on the map, then click the tab for “Local Data/Records” and follow links to the data you want.  Different areas have different kinds and amounts of data, depending on the local weather recording stations:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/

A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

This blog is not abandoned.  :)

It didn’t even go off my radar, get forgotten, nor did I take a deliberate break from it. I am a diarist at heart, and most days this fall when I’ve been in the garden, bringing in the harvest, or walking in nature, I have composed a blog post in my head.  The trouble is with the time it takes to transfer from thought to paper or computer.

I thought of a blog post as we wrapped up the final market day, and switched our focus from feeding other people, to preparing our own winter food supply.

Our table last day at the Westside Farmers Market - incredible celery, leeks, and celeriac this fall.

I thought of a blog post as the first frosts hit and we started to say goodbye to the garden, and began to light a fire in the woodstove daily.

I thought of a blog post as we dug potatoes, and more potatoes ….and more potatoes.

Tiredly, I thought often about posting about the sanctuary I felt in the garden, even if for only half an hour of twilight at the end of a frantically busy work day.

Last big harvest before frost.

I thought of a blog post as I walked through a wooded patch, hearing the birds, noticing how green the moss looks after a rain, when everything else has turned into winter browns.

I thought of a reactionary blog post every time I listened to news about Occupy Wall Street, “consumer confidence”, anti-consumerism, and the Plastic Ocean.

I composed words in my head about our harvest as it filled every bin, bucket, and tray we had, as we worked in the rain and by flashlight to bring the last of the perishables in by the first hard frost.

But with all this doing, our hands have been a bit busy for blog posting.  I am continually thankful and amazed by the enormous amount of food two people working two other jobs can produce from a tiny little plot of land.  We grow so much of what we eat now.  Eggs, chicken, greens of all sorts, beans, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, rutabega, squash, popcorn, apples, berries, herbs, onions, garlic, leeks, radishes, carrots.  Our own pickles, krauts, jams, sauces, cider.  So much to write about, and so little time to write!

Remains of the market garden

Some people call us a farm.  Some are amused that we call ourselves a farm.  Some get grand ideas in their head of how we must live and what the garden looks like, imagining an orderly organic utopia.  Sometimes their silence when they come to visit seems to tell of their disappointment.  We are small.  The “market field” is just a big messy garden.   The shutters are falling off the house because most days, we’re too darn busy or exhausted to fix them.  Our furniture is mismatched, and our kitchen needs remodeling.  This is what it looks like to live as much as we can right now from a patch of land, trying to reduce the need to buy, to turn less garbage loose into the world than we might. This is what it looks like to make do, purchase less, grow more, work hard.

Digging potatoes, and immediately replanting the bed with endive seedlings - just barely visible at the top of the photo.

And yet, somehow, we manage to grow enough beautiful produce to sell to others while feeding ourselves.    Somehow, we had an enormous Thanksgiving supper where the only store-bought ingredients I used in the cooking were milk, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, flour, arrowroot powder, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sugar, and wine.  There was so much joy and pride in roasting the 10 lb 3 oz “turkey” chicken who grew running around in our back yard, and so much peace and fulfillment in carrying baskets of greens and roots in from the garden, rather than braving the crowd at the grocery store.

The promoters of monoculture farming retaliate against the rise of interest in local food.  They try to win support by saying we can’t feed the world with small farmers, local produce, and organic techniques.  Yet I don’t see how 7 billion+ people will eat sustainably without digging up our lawns to grow chemical-free food.  I’m thankful for those who grow their own, or support others who do.   I’m thankful for the shoppers I know who are trying to buy less, buy locally, and use less plastic (in all senses of the word).  For me, Thanksgiving is about celebrating what bounty we can produce, rather than what bounty we can buy.  It’s about celebrating the wonder of being able to grow our food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The garden’s a mess.  Torrential rains, followed by extreme heat, kept us back from some of the work we might have done to keep it tidy at crucial times.  Plants are sprawling all over each other, “rows” have run together, and some of the weeds are sky-high.

It doesn’t seem to be interfering with our harvests, for the most part.  Okay, I lost half a row of leeks under some overgrown arugula that fell over on them in a windstorm, because I hadn’t taken the time to pull it out when it was essentially past its prime.  And then I didn’t find the time to pull it off the leeks until it was too late and they were collapsed and rotting beneath it.

But there is an up-side to the disorder - we are seeing record numbers of beneficial creatures and insects.  For several weeks now, it’s been rare to harvest something without finding a praying mantis patrolling the veggies, or frogs jumping out of my path.  And recently, while examining for tomato hornworm damage, we found this:

Interrupted right in the middle of breakfast! A hornworm, covered with pupating wasps, right above the bite-marks it left in the tomato leaf...

Under the cottony white packages, there is a green caterpillar with a red spike on its butt - a tomato hornworm, a fantastically destructive creature.  They blend in perfectly with tomato stems, and are difficult to see until you notice the damage.  By the time you notice the damage, there’s a lot of damage to notice. One worm will have defoliated half a tomato plant, bitten into the developing fruit, and lopped off the replacement buds.  But - they have a predator that stops them in their tracks.  This hornworm is hosting a nice clutch of parasitic braconid wasp cocoons.

The wasps are small, and their cocoons are the tiny white wooly packages dotting the top of the hornworm.  Those aren’t part of the hornworm.  The description of what the wasps do to the hornworm reads like poetry to the organic farmer who has picked her share of hornworms off by hand, and endured their rampages.  In short, the wasps lay eggs in the caterpillar, the larvae feed off the caterpillar’s innards, and hatch out through to its surface to form their cocoons and finish pupating.  Here’s a more descriptive page about it.

Nearby, there was a second parasitized hornworm. The hornworms were literally stopped in their tracks, beside the chewed up leaf they’d been feasting upon.  I watched them for a few days - they were always in the same location, not dead yet, but obviously sick and not moving, and most importantly - not eating!

Last summer, we had record numbers of hornworms, but I found only one of these parasitized hornworms, with just a few cocoons.  I carefully watched that one, and left it in its place.  If you find one of these, don’t remove it!!  The hornworm  is a goner, even while still alive, and you can leave it alone without fearing it will continue to do damage.  It’s important to leave it so the wasp larvae can complete their hatching and become more wasps  that can kill more tomato hornworms.  This year we have had radically less hornworm problems, and at least double the sighted evidence of braconid wasps.

The wasps are tiny, cute even, and harmless to humans.  They are part of why I won’t put anything harmful on my garden.  Not anything.  Not even the organically-sanctioned treatments.  I may have garden chaos, I may lose some things to pests, and I may have holes in some produce.  But we also have an environment.  We have a mini-ecosystem keeping its own checks and balances.  What I use in the garden to kill the caterpillars will also kill or affect the wasps.   And the bees, and the mantises, and the other pollinators and predators.  Not cool, not what we want, not why we are doing this.    The frogs, the mantises, the parasitic wasps, the spiders, and the assassin bugs that find a home in our jungle garden have taken several years to make their way there, and they are integral to the way our garden works.

So the besieged caterpillars stayed on the tomato plants for a few days, until one day they were gone, probably dropped to the ground dead.  I noticed only when I could zoom into the photo while editing, that the little wasps had already hatched from one of the clutches when I photographed it:

Their cocoons have their hatch doors popped up, and the cocoons are empty.  Another tiny army of protectors is out there already, patrolling for us, finding the hornworms we won’t see.

M called me this morning from up the road about 4 miles, and practically shouted “I just saw an eagle!”  There was more to the story, but the sighting was nearby, so I threw on my boots and grabbed my camera and the bird book and headed up there.

I didn’t see it.  I drove back and forth in the area for about 10 minutes and nothing happened.

I was just starting home when, about a quarter mile ahead I did see a big bird wheel across the road.  I marked the spot mentally and slowed the car over to the edge where I thought it should be… and there it was.  Big and brown on a tree branch about 40 feet up, way bigger than a hawk.  I turned on the camera and turned off the car and started the video recording.  I shot just a few seconds then slowly started to open the car door… and saw him lean forward and take off.  So then I jumped out of the car and tried to keep him in the viewfinder, all zoomed up close, and not get hit by passing cars.  I didn’t do too well, most of the 60 seconds is not of the eagle.  But there were a few seconds that were just breathtaking, big swooping sweeps of wings in the gentle snow as he wheeled around and then headed off east.

Juvenile Bald Eagle, near Manchester Michigan, Feb 26 2011. Click for high resolution version.

Click it for the high resolution version.  Here are 13 sequential frames (one big wing flap down and up) starting from upper right.  I cut and pasted these all together onto the background of the first frame.  It seems to be a juvenile bald eagle, from what we can see in the books that we have.  Here’s a single frame:

It was pretty stunning.  I’ve seen eagles before, and they’re always breathtaking, but we’ve never seen one so close to Dragonwood.