What’s up with Winter?

As I just made coffee with my espresso machine and killing off the ants. For the last four years January and part of February has been summer weather. The bugs start coming out like flies and moths and ants. Then it snows. The trees start to bloom depending on where they are planted. Rich my neighbor up the hill has peach blossoms started and had to cover his tree. Lucky for him it's small.

The ranchers I've talked to said that apples have been down and real small apples. Blossoms fall off trees when it snows late in the year. Been having snow as late as end of May.

What is amazing when you heat the ocean it expands and takes up more space. Simple concept. When you heat water moisture comes off water too. That's easy to understand. Think of it as taking a shower and the rest of the house is cold. Steam condenses on the cold surfaces. That's like the big freeze on the east coast this winter. We are having snow where it never snows before because the moistures in the air from the warm expanding ocean.

Bark beetles are suppose to die in the winter when it gets cold. Since we have this warm winters the only way to kill off back beetles is when they run out of food. They eat pine and there are several types of them. They live at different heights of the tree. One night I was sitting here when it sounded like a bird hit the screen, it was in summer. I looked at the door and it was a bark beetle the size of a small bird. I've found that adding fertilizer to the base of a tree will keep the tree going but the bugs are still there. I used a weed and feed and think that killed the bark beetles because it brought up stuff in the sap they weren't ready for. I've checked many colleges about back beetle and there's nothing you can do about them. Until they run out of food they are going to be here.

Took pictures of it snowing but it's too hard to hold up the camera. I even put my smallest lens on and it's still to heavy.

If you can get KPFA streaming they are playing Grateful Dead a lot of never heard tracks before. Then they have been like that for years. Made money touring and not on records. They were also the only bands that would give out bootlegs of concerts.

One reason I'm bringing up this winters weather is because I've been active in phenology with many colleges. I've been sending them pictures of plants here that they never have seen before and when they have bloomed. Times are changing. If our food stocks start blooming and then goes into a freeze the blooms die. So does out food. So this is a real problem.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.