The Solar Thaw

I have been watching the south-facing snow banks along the street, wondering when the snow would begin to melt back wherever dust and dirt catches the sun. Today was the first sign of it this year. I think it takes a certain combination of sun angle, sunny days, and air temperature, so the date varies.  I have a picture of an advanced stage of the thaw from March 15th, three years ago,  here.

Harvest Home

Picture this (because I don't know where to find a camera with batteries charged up):

• onions and beets spread to dry on newsprint
• cardboard boxes brimming with carrots, potatoes, and squashes
• bags of dry beans, with the sides rolled down to let the beans dry a little more

This week I'll be storing things away a little better: tucking the onions into old nylons and hanging them on nails on the floor joists in the basement; cleaning up some of the carrots and beets and finding some room for them in the fridge, freezing some others, and maybe drying some for soups, too; and clearing some room in a not-too-cool spot for the squashes to sit with some air spaces between them. The dry beans are experiments. I have been growing Windsor broad (or fava) beans for several years, but never understood what they should look like when mature. Finally I read somewhere that they can be picked when the pods start to turn black, and realized that this was not a sign of disease! I let them dry on the vines, and today we gathered them. Also, as a sort of accidental experiment, we gathered the dry wax beans that we didn't get eaten as fresh beans in the summer. We eat a lot of kidney beans and some chickpeas, lentils, and pinto beans, but all of these are tricky to grow in our short summers, so I want to experiment with some other dry legumes. We'll see!

I am very tired, and very happy. I let myself be led away from the garden path for most of the summer and early fall, and when I heard the word "snow" in the forecast I feared I had left it too long, but the rain and snow held off and we got it all in.

Happy thanksgiving!

That Time of Year

These are the days when the temperature creeps up close to the melting point, and the strengthening sun pushes sand and dust particles up over that crucial point, thawing a honeycomb of brown-lined caves into the south sides of the snow ridges along the street. I noticed it beginning a week or so ago, when the air temperature was still staying well below zero, but the solar melt had begun.

Last week, too, I noticed my neighbour blowing the bank of snow away from the wall of his house. He piles it up there all winter, keeping the house warmer, and then when the thaw approaches, he clears it away and keeps the house dry. I wonder how he knows when to do it.

These are the days when the sun warms the pavement, and any snow that sifts across it in a breeze is apt to stick. On Monday I got out on the highway and found it a skating rink, so I crept along for two miles and then escaped to the safety of a gravel back road to finish the trip to Carlyle. On Thursday I went directly to the back road.

These are the days, some years, when I am starting to wonder where I will pile the snow if I have to shovel any more. This year, I am just wishing it would snow. I'd take a picture of the snow pile, to compare to other years, but there isn't one. Aside from clearing a bit away from the doorway, I haven't shovelled snow all winter. My neighbour's snow bank against his house was so small, I think he cleared it in one pass with the blower. Our snow is just packed on the driveway, because it never got deep enough to bother. Last winter I think we had more snow on the ground in November than we've had throughout this winter. And last winter there was almost no runoff.

These are the days when I notice horned larks again. I don't know if they've just returned, or if they've been here for a few weeks but I've finally returned to the back roads to see them. What wonderful symbols of hope they are, adapting to fallow field and gravel road side, returning to this snowy barren landscape before there is any sign of spring except the quick flash of their own tiny wings and black-edged tails.

Lake Arcola 2007

Lake Arcola near the peak of spring runoff, March 27, 2007

After all the excitement about the snow this year, the runoff was a bit of a disappointment. I was not too surprised. I had been murmuring all winter that it really wasn't that much snow; the ditches were full, but a good deal of that snow had blown off the fields way back in November, and the snowfall for the rest of the winter was nothing spectacular. On top of that (or rather, underneath), the soil was very dry, so most of the melt water just sank straight down.

Lake Arcola put in a modest appearance, less than 2005 but higher than last year. I wonder if it would have been higher, had they not plowed out the drainage ditches before the thaw. I don't recall them doing that other years.

The Snow Pile Dwindles

I don't like the looks of that brown strip to the left of the pile. I had a suspicion that the grass might not do so well under my snow-push path.

My (Melting) Glacier

Kind of like posing with the big fish you caught. Obviously the shovel is just a prop in this photo, but it's the same one I used to collect most of that snow off the driveway (off the photo to the left of the garage in the background) through this winter. The pile had already shrunk quite a bit by the time this was taken (March 13th). It sure beat last year! At its peak, it was as tall as I could reasonably throw the shovelfuls, almost as high as my head, all the way to the right of the picture. The path I am standing in leads nowhere; I just used it to push the snow along to new, lower sections of the ridge as I was building it. My plan was also to keep that path clear as a spillway for meltwater in the spring, and it looks like it worked. The area between the garage and the house has been a big puddle in other years, but this year the runoff is draining away nicely.

I had a bit of help from time to time. Sometimes Garth would stride up the driveway and back to clear two wheel tracks before driving out in the morning. One day Dad and James helped me remove the usual drift from just in front of the garage door, and Dad was gleefully flipping the snow clear over my ridge at its tallest point. Mostly, though, this glacier-building project was a slow and steady, meditative, muscle-building pastime just for me.

Maybe a north-facing driveway is not so bad. I've had an ice-free path for the bike for about a week now.

The Bin at the Back of Beyond

While I was thigh-deep in those snowbanks, it occurred to me that I could try vermicomposting.

I recovered my senses during the trudge back out.

Mandalas

I remember a colouring book full of circular designs. When we ran out of pages to colour, we drew our own mandalas. I seem to recall drawing mandalas for some years afterwards.

More recently I heard about Tibetan monks visiting Regina and making a sand mandala at the library. It remained on display for a short while, and then all the coloured sands were swept together and the monks moved on.

I didn't go to see it.

It seemed as if mandalas were just a colourful moment in my memory, until Deb's dream sent me looking for a website to link as an explanation for my comment at her site.

And then I realized that I have built a mandala in my backyard.

And there are mandalas everywhere.

We Have a Blizzard

This fanciful image appeared in the Environment Canada weather forecast summary this evening, to symbolize a blizzard. To me it suggests something more like pixie dust. Anyway, the forecast is for a low of -25ºC with winds of 40 km/h gusting to 60, producing a windchill of -35ºC. We're not quite there yet. Tomorrow is supposed to be even colder, but the snow is ending sometime overnight, and that will end the blizzard. There is actually very little snow with this system - a "dusting," they said in the blizzard warning - but it's certainly blowing around. If there was more snowfall, it might not be so cold. This is one of those unusual bits of weather when it's cold but not calm, snowing but not warm. (Well, warm is a relative term, don't you know?)

Garth expected to be on the road tonight, but his meeting was cancelled, so I trust that he is safe in Moosomin where he has been working this week. His brother Brian, on the other hand, drove to Weyburn for a bonspiel.

******

UPDATE - well, that was brief; right after I posted this, I looked again at the forecast and the blizzard warning was ended. I guess we didn't get the four hours of sustained low visibility and cold windchill required to make it an official blizzard.

Best Snowmobile Rally Yet

Prairie Place Hall was packed when I left around 4 p.m. More tables were being squeezed in for riders coming in off the trail. I heard that there were 500 riders registered - the largest turnout yet. Grace told me the snow was good and deep, even out on the fields where some has blown off, and the sloughs have nice deep powder. All in all, the Arcola Optimists' Snowmobile Rally looked like a great success compared to last year.

I was at the hall to clear tables on behalf of the Girl Guides (since my daughter is a Pathfinder). We parents donate our time clearing tables, and the Girl Guide organization gets bags and bags of empty beer cans to turn in for the refund money. It's their biggest fundraiser, and it also looks good for the Girl Guides to be doing a recycling project.

But for me, it always rankles a bit. This time I was determined to enjoy it as best I could, so I looked for familiar faces and went visiting in between my rounds of the tables. Having some fun helped me ignore the loud music and the great show of consumption in all those shiny helmets on the tables and gaudy single-purpose jackets draped on the chairs.

When I got home though, I went looking for information about snowmobile fuel consumption. I learned something: those figures are hard to find. Of the four major manufacturers, only one bothered to back up their claims of "solid" or "excellent" fuel economy with an actual figure. Bombardier (Ski-Doo), headquartered in Canada, offered a comparison chart showing its 600 cc class engines (the smallest engines offered) on par with a Yamaha model at about 22 or 23 mpg, while Arctic Cat and Polaris models in the same class trailed behind at 18 mpg or less. Of course, for the larger engines, there were no numbers given, just claims of "outstanding" or "incredible" fuel economy. The general silence is not surprising, I suppose; when your smallest, newest, most fuel-efficient snow machine carries a single rider less than half as many miles per gallon as our ten-year-old four-passenger car, you don't have much to brag about.

Now for some rough estimates. Five hundred riders - I wonder if that means 500 sleds, or were some people riding double? Sixty-eight miles of trail - did they all do the full 68 miles, or were there shorter loops as options? Well, I'll be friendly and assume that 400 sleds travelled an average of 50 miles each. That's - gulp - 20,000 sled miles. Even with a ridiculously friendly estimate of 20 miles per gallon on average, that's 1000 gallons of gas. And then there's all the fuel used hauling those sleds and riders into Arcola from far and wide.

Well, if they're buying some of that gas at the Co-op, it means membership dividend money in my own pocket. The event brings in funds for the hall, and the local grocery stores get to supply food for it, and I suppose business picks up around town over the weekend. Do I dare complain?

On the other hand, isn't it a bit ironic that the Arcola Girl Guides pride themselves on the environmental benefits of their recycling program, when this gas-guzzling event is such a big part of it?

I wonder. Could we take all the effort that goes into this event, and spread it over the year, providing small entertainment events to help keep Arcola residents here in town, weekend after weekend? As it is, dozens of people go off to the cities for entertainment every weekend, and do their shopping while they're there. Then our service clubs and businesses get together and try to draw a big crowd out here for one weekend to compensate. Is this the best we can do for our town, and for our world?

Yonge Street, Rocks and Trees, Alberta

Yahoo! Canada News: "TORONTO (CP) - It's beginning to look a lot like a green Christmas for most of the country east of Alberta."

Wow. I should have known it was too early to hibernate.

I wake up mid-winter and find I must have missed some sort of referendum.

Snow Wardens

As I was shoveling snow yesterday, I got wondering about the history of this task. Did a pioneer woman shovel through drifts to make an easier passage for the sleigh up to the house? Or did the sleigh just pack the snow down around the yard? I know that if you always walk the same path through the snow, you can get into trouble later in the winter, when your feet begin to slide off the sides of your packed path down into the softer and much deeper snow to the sides. I imagined a sleigh side-slipping off its runner tracks into deeper snow - not a good thing for the horses. But maybe they just drove the sleigh slightly to one side or the other each time, to pack a wider track, much like I deliberately trample the path a bit wider in the snow. Could you get the horses to do that?

I looked at some pictures in the Arcola-Kisbey history book, but I couldn't be sure what was done. I did find a picture from spring of 1903, showing the sidewalk (boardwalk?) cleared in front of the storefronts, but hemmed in by a wall of snow on the adjacent street surface, as high as a man.

A Google search for "horse-drawn snowplow" turned up just what I wanted - an essay on the history of snow removal. It turns out that I was partly right: snow was not removed from the roads at all, but rather packed down to make a good running surface for the sleighs. But it was done much more deliberately than I had imagined. Have you ever heard of a snow warden?

The Snow Pile Today

It's bigger than last year (in March!), that's for sure. I'd say about four times bigger. I can't get a perfect comparative photo, because I built it closer to the chokecherry behind it this year, to keep the melt water off the driveway and out of the porch.

One of those feral cats made the mistake of trotting into my snow push path while I was gathering another shovel load. She had to stretch up just to see over the end of it, to assess her options.

Then she came back up to the bend and hunched down, looking at me. I paused and talked to her, suggesting that she should take the chance to run forward and past me, but she just stared. Heartlessly, then, I pushed the snow load on towards her, and she hurried back to the dead end. "It's deep," I warned, but she plunged on.

Poor kitty. I wish I'd got a video. She looked like she was swimming.

Here to Stay

This is more like it! Our first lasting snow of the season came last Thursday evening, and the big storm blew in yesterday. Here's the snow pile from a better angle to compare to last year's photo from the beginning of March.

This pile is bigger already. I was out before daylight topping it up with the new snowdrifts from overnight, to keep Garth from shovelling and re-injuring his elbow. It's been puffed up and glowing red a couple of times in the last few days, but it improves with rest and a castor oil pack. He thinks he hurt it in a curling game, sweeping.

Just as I was pushing the last ridges out of the way so he could back the car out, his colleague phoned to say he was stuck, in a back alley near Coteau and Mountain. I put the shovel in the car and jumped in.

We saw a vehicle churning its way slowly out of the south end of that alley, but when we got around to the north end we found two big drifts between the street and the snowed-in car. I started in with the shovel while the men discussed the situation. They decided the car could stay where it was; Garth would give him a ride for today.

With all the computer gear and two big men, the Geo was looking a bit crowded, so I put the shovel on my shoulder and walked home.

Looks like B had no trouble getting out to the cleared street and away to work.

Streetwalking Season

It was a surreal scene on Main Street at dusk, with the headlights of a riding snowblower illuminating the drifting snow where the sidewalk was partially cleared, and more headlights picking out the bank of a large snow ridge piled down the center of the street.

I kept out of the way of the snowblower and scurried through the deep snow by the corner, back onto the plowed surface of the side street that leads me home. Off Main Street, the sidewalks are all buried about six inches deep, except where the grader piled the windrow over them, or that place by the school where somebody pushed a great heap about four feet high. I can see giving up on the sidewalks in late January, but November?

The strangest sight of this evening, though, was the large V of noisy geese, racing south above it all.

Finally Green

At last. The land south of our place looks green this week, instead of the patches of green mixed with large areas of pale brown where last year's grass still stood tall.

The dull brown time seemed to drag on, this spring, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe it was just that I was impatient, since I was seeing so many pictures of lush growth and flowers on southern blogs. Finally I realized what had happened: there wasn't enough snow last winter to knock down the grass. Usually the colour change goes quite quickly from white through a muddy black-and-brown phase to green, but this year the brown lingered. In the brick ponds, it hung on for months.

Ah, green. I feel better now.

Thoughts while shovelling

When we lived in Regina, we said we would never again buy a house with a north-facing driveway.

Oops.

But for some reason, it doesn't seem so bad. My guess is that we don't drive as much, so we get it shovelled before we pack much onto it.

It's not a terribly long driveway. I only shovel the paved part, and let the loop around the other side of the house fill up with snow. That way the grader operator has enough frontage for dumping his windrow, so he doesn't slop it over the main driveway. This year, though, we had so little snow, they didn't even start grading until a week or so ago, and I guess they forgot which end of the driveway to bury. Not enough traffic to make it obvious.

Anyway, while I was shovelling the dearly welcomed four inches or so of fluffy white stuff Wednesday evening, I was thinking about doing a photo essay about the chore.

What would be the point of that? Evidence that I actually work sometimes? "See Laura work! Work, Laura, work!"

I was thinking I could make a "how-to" post out of it - "How to Move a Lot of Snow." I had worked out such a clever pattern to minimize the work. I pushed as much snow as possible on each journey down the driveway, and never wasted effort moving it back and forth while gathering it up. I had a path cleared, just the width of the shovel, all the way down the driveway. Starting at the far end, I'd push snow across the width of the driveway, and into the start of my path. Once more across to catch the stuff that fell off the side of the shovel, and I had a big pile in the start of the path. It was all I could push, but almost all of it went down the path, held in by the ridges left on previous trips. Working this way, I didn't need one of those great heavy snow scoops with sides on it. Just an ordinary wide-blade snow shovel.

As I cleared my way down the driveway, the path to the back yard got shorter and shorter, and shinier and shinier. I wish I could have got you a picture of the times when I misjudged and made the pile in the path too big for my snowboots' traction.

I worked out an extra trick for pushing a lot of snow without getting stalled by the extra resistance where it hasn't been moved yet. I'd section off an area of snow by pushing a cross-wise path through it, and then work back across, clearing the section into the path with that rhythmic scoop-and-toss pattern that most people use to just windrow the snow along the side of the driveway. Then I'd push my whole cross-wise windrow over to the main path and away I'd go.

Now, you might be wondering why I don't just do it the way most people do, and pile the snow along the side. Here we come to the rationalization I invented for calling this a "how-to" post. You see, a how-to article should really address something useful, or as Contrary Goddess puts it, something that contributes to the community. I figure my contribution is that I leave extra room in that narrow tree-row for the neighbour to pile her snow. Less work for her.

The beauty of it is that my technique involves almost no work at all. If I did that scoop-and-toss thing up into the tree row, that would involve a vertical displacement of the snow. My scoop-and-toss is really more of a push-swish thing, and as my engineer father loved to remind me when I was lugging hay bales, it doesn't matter how far you move something along, there's no work involved unless you move it up. Work is defined as, oh, I forget, something times height.

Yep, Dad. If I was a proper diligently efficient adult and just pitched that snow into the tree row, that would be work. When I cleverly channel-plow it all into the back yard, that's pure play.



I know, I know, there's some vertical displacement involved in making that pile. Believe me, I know.

Back in the land of the almost alive

I was looking at a blog I often read, and thinking it's time for another post there. Then I came back to my own blog and realized it's much longer since I posted myself. I was away at a conference in Yorkton (I know, Eleutheros - a bunch of people in a stuffy room tossing bags of air to each other), and then church and catching up at home, and then Monday night I went down with the flu. Ohh, I was out of practise. Kids handle it so much better. Dry heaves were getting me up every hour until I finally sought the Internet's advice, got past all the suggestions that involved doctors and pharmacists, and found out I should be sipping water. Sleep at last. Nothing but water all the next morning, and then a stagger downtown for some apple juice. This morning I tried a little toast. I'm hoping that the lingering headache is just a side effect of fasting.

The conference was fun, anyway. It's a chance to catch up on friendships with like-minded people - "plant nerds," as the seed-testing guy called us. He described himself and his coworkers as "the lab geeks of the plant nerds." He gave a talk on seed testing procedures and regulations, and how native plant seed just doesn't fit the system. Boring? Not at all! He was so warmly engaging and self-deprecating, and he showed up the ironies of his work so well. Seed testing is done with reference to grade tables, which list particular crops and the standards for each. Crested wheat grass, an introduced species that invades native grassland and excludes other species, gradually simplifying the vegetation and reducing the depth and fertility of the soil profile, is a recognized crop species included in the grade tables. It's a crop, but definitely not something that you want to be planting in a native prairie reclamation project. Green needle grass, a native species widely used in seed mixes for reclamation, is not in the grade tables. So, if you send a sample of a native species - say, northern wheatgrass - for testing, the standard procedure would treat any crested wheat grass in the sample as "other crop," and any green needle grass as a "weed."

He got a good laugh with that example. He also described ways that his company will try to work within the grade tables, using alternative procedures, to give the best representation of native seed. For example, if that northern wheatgrass sample has a lot of green needle grass in it, he will look at grading it as a mix, instead of as northern wheatgrass. His name is Morgan Webb, and the company is Seed Check Technologies Inc., in Leduc, Alberta. The website gives a sense of that same warm-hearted, fun-loving spirit that Morgan showed in person. (A tip for navigating the website: no scroll bars appeared in my browser, but I found that I could just click somewhere in the text and then use the up and down arrows to scroll.)

I showed some of my winter botany photos at the members' slide night, but when Morgan mentioned that seed testers have to take 16-hour government exams and be able to identify roughly 2000 species by seed characteristics alone, well, I was humbled.

Speaking of winter, we've had a bit of snow here (just in time to give us some whiteouts and icy snowpack on the drive to Yorkton), but already the fields and ditches are going brown again. We're supposed to get a high of -18°C and a low of -33°C on Friday, but then right back up to near normal temperatures on the weekend. Normal would be a high of -7°C, but for most of this winter, it's been warmer than that. Darn, I'd take a week of -40°C nights, just to kill off some insects, but I'm afraid we aren't going to get it.

Well, if I can sit up and write this long, I must be feeling better. Time to get on with ordering garden seed. Yes, it's a little late, but not as bad as you might think. I see that our southern friends are already well into growing things, but we really shouldn't start here until around March 1st.

Six days till Garth gets home! I owe him another posting on his website, and I really need to clean up my clutter before I have to share the bedroom again. Okay. One feeble step at a time.

Tough Sledding

At the turning of the year, I wrote about the lack of snowmobiling action around here over the Christmas holidays. At that time, I reviewed the climate data from various stations nearby and concluded that a brown New Year's wasn't that extraordinary. Now here we are a month later, and still virtually no snow. The annual Snowmobile Rally organized by the Arcola Optimists went ahead last weekend, with posters proclaiming "We Have Snow!", but they had to trailer the sleds up into the hills where there actually was a bit of snow on the bush trails. There were only about a quarter as many riders as last year, from what I hear.

I'm also hearing comments from bloggers all over the continent about the mild conditions. Deb in Minnesota saw pussy willows in mid-January! Wondering what happened to our usual arctic high pressure systems, I thought to myself that maybe we've had them and just not noticed, because the arctic air is so warm.

Not so, according to this story from Yahoo News:

It's not like winter evaporated. It has just skirted the world's second largest country and focused its fury on other parts of the globe.

Arctic weather masses have left parts of Europe encased in ice. Greece has endured its heaviest snowfall in a decade. And an extreme cold snap across Russia sent temperatures plummeting to -40C and left dozens dead.

Oh dear. I hadn't heard anything about that. I did hear that there have been big disruptions in natural gas supply in parts of eastern Europe. That combination spells misery or worse.

Yet we go complacently along. I know that our home's heating system is doubly vulnerable, because the furnace won't run unless it has both natural gas and electricity. I've wondered about rigging up some sort of pedal-powered alternate drive for the fan, and a backup electrical supply if needed for the valve controls, so that we could at least have some heat as long as the gas supply was on. Then I get thinking that it might be simpler and better to just add a woodstove. I'd really like to rearrange the whole floor plan so that we don't have picture windows facing north and west, and most of the south wall taken up by an unheated porch. It just doesn't make sense for solar gain.

Then again, with the cloudy winter we've had so far, there wasn't much solar gain to miss.

***************

Update - Wayne has more about mild weather in North America, and the long-term context.

New Year's Eve

Unable to travel home for Christmas due to a new batch of puppies, Kate got nostalgic about taking the snowmobiles out to chase hares and gaze at the stars. The truth is, there wasn't much snowmobiling action for her to miss around here, although the hares would have a tough time hiding in their white coats.


Sorry about the dim photo, but that's about the best I could do at 5 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Another unusual thing about this view (looking north from the highway just west of Arcola) is that you can't see the hills, only about 3 miles away and rising nearly 400 feet above this plain.

I spent the later part of New Year's Eve downloading the climate data for western Canada and browsing through snow-depth records for our area. I found some partial records for Handsworth and Willmar starting in 1980, but for a consistent and older record the closest station I found was Estevan, with data going back to 1955. I had been thinking these brown Christmas holidays were a new thing, but Estevan had Christmases with essentially no snow in 1957, 1966, 1976, 1979, 1986 and 1987, as well as the recent ones that I remembered from 1997 and 1999. A brown New Year's Eve is a little more unusual, but there was only 2 cm of snow on the ground in Estevan in 1956. Other years with little or no snow on New Year's Eve include 1979, 1980, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1997, and 1999.

When I compare these records with the partial data for Handsworth (in the hills west of Moose Mountain Provincial Park) and Willmar (south of Arcola), it seems to confirm my suspicion that we often have snow when Estevan doesn't, and the hills may have snow when the nearby plains don't. Handsworth had 6 cm on New Year's Eve 1986, and 7 cm in 1987. Maybe there weren't any brown Christmases at the farm when I was growing up, after all. I don't know what the snow is like over at Handsworth this year, but when I drove out to the farm yesterday, the hills were still looking very brown here.

Daily precipitation and temperature records are available for many more stations and much longer periods than the snow depth data. I wonder how hard it would be to model probable snow depth from those records, to estimate how many brown Christmases there were back in the early 1900s. It might be easier and more accurate to just ask around among the old-timers. Hopefully their memories are better than mine.

Anyway, if you're wondering how I marked the turning of the year, I didn't. It passed quietly sometime while I was exploring tables of snow depths. Garth was incommunicado in Pokhara, Nepal; otherwise it would have been fun to do a couple of phone smooches, once when midnight swept by over there, and again when it finally got around to us nearly twelve hours later.