Old-Time Weather Wisdom
This year when I was getting ready to plant my spring garden, I was a little hesitant to plant according to frost date this year. In February, I had seen a local farmer post on Facebook something that sounded to me like pioneer weather wisdom:
February thunder brings a May frost.
It sounded like something out of the Farmer’s Almanac. We had a thunderstorm on February 2, this year, and while our last frost date is usually around Mother’s Day (May 8), we had a frost on May 16. That frost damaged several crops in the area, and I was glad I had seen that farmer’s post and had waited to plant in my garden.
I saw another saying come true this year as well and this time, it was from farmers who had to wait until after the frost and then had a second delay in planting due to rain. When most finally got around to planting, they noticed that at the same time there was a lot of white stuff floating around in the air.
“There’ll be one snow in the coming winter for every fog in August.”
The book also gives advice on using insects as thermometers. Grasshoppers are loudest at 95F, but can’t make noise below 62F. If you hear a house cricket, count how many times he chirps in 14 seconds and add 40 to the temperature where the cricket is. Ants don’t emerge from their dens unless it is 55F or above. Bees cluster outside their hive at 102F and inside at 57F. No noise from insects means it is 40F or below.
There are also tips on predicting the weather by the moon. Researchers are finding there is a correlation between the full moon, cloudiness, rainfall and thunderstorms. The full moon can raise the temperature of the lower four miles of the Earth’s atmosphere by a few hundredths of a degree – enough to affect the weather.
The post Old-Time Weather Wisdom appeared first on LewRockwell.
Leave a Reply