Spring is Here!

Freeville and the greater Ithaca area is finally greening up.  First, the shrubs, and now the trees, are beginning to open up their leaves.

The flowering trees across the area are in bloom, the insects and birds are back, and spring is officially in the air!

Last Bit of Leaves

Last Wednesday, I finally took the last six bags of leaves to the county recycling center.  As you can see, I'm not the only one.  My yard isn't completely devoid of leaves, though.  There are still some leaves scattered on the lawn, and there are plenty of fallen leaves under the trees and among the wildflowers.  They'll be left to decompose at their own pace and enrich the soil.  With winter rolling in, I don't see myself making another trip to the recycling center anytime soon, but once the weather turns warm again, I'll clear out some weeds from the garden and wildflower areas, and then have more bags to take. But for now, I don't mind staying warm inside the house.

Yard work plans 10/21

The good news: I spent a lot of time working in the yard yesterday.  The bad news: I spent most of that time avoiding raking.  The blurriness of this picture is pretty representative of the way I feel about raking.

In the morning, the leaves were still wet from Friday's rain, so rather than try to do anything in the yard, I drove about 10 minutes to the local nursery to check it out.  I came away with one plant and a book; more on that later this week.  After some lunch, I got outside and started moving the piles of leaves that I had raked last week and the week before to my various storage areas around the property.  I soon tired of this, though, and moved to the garden to continue clearing out the weeds.  I'll have a picture post from these efforts later this week.  I still wasn't ready to start raking, so I moved to the wildflower patch by the deer trail and began to remove the thorny plants.  I'd like to eventually add more variety to the wildflower areas in the yard, and getting rid of those pesky thorny plants is the first logical step, at least to my naive mind.  I'll have a couple of pictures of clearing the thorny plants later this week, too.  Finally, I brought the laptop outside so I could play some music and move some leaves.  I got the patio cleared, and just in time for one squirrel.

Just before writing this post this morning, I noticed a squirrel surveying the patio with a nut in his/her mouth (I'll assume it was male).  He looked at a couple of crevices between the stones before settling on one.  With me staring at him the whole time, he dug into the soil and deposited the nut into his hole, with only four feet and a glass door between us.

Squirrels are decidedly less skittish when they're trying to preserve their food for the long, harsh Upstate New York winter.

This squirrel was completely focusing on getting that nut in the ground, and he paid me no mind whatsoever.

Aftet the nut was securely buried, the squirrel covered the spot with leaves and began to scamper away.  Then he paused and turned around.  He gave the spot one last look, maybe as a reminder as to where it was, or maybe to re-assure himself that the nut was safe.

For today, I'll be outside with some tunes trying to get some raking done...

Yard Work Plans, 10/20

Sometimes there are things that you just have to do, whether you like it or not.  This weekend, raking the leaves and clearing the lawn is one of those things.  I'm not terribly fond of raking.  Using a rake is kind of awkward, and, to me, it's really tedious.  At least with mowing the lawn, you're moving around all the time.  But rake I must, so rake I will.

One of my questions was where to put the leaves.  I don't want to bag them all and take them to the county recycling center....that would be lots of bags and several trips with my car.  I had some daylight yesterday to walk around the property and survey for areas to pile the leaves to compost.  There are plenty of places to scatter the leaves - on the slope next to the creek, in amongst the wildflowers, under the trees and next to the piles of branches.  But I think my big leaf storage/compost area will behind the shed.  This is an area that is covered mostly with dirt, not with rocks, cinder blocks, or bricks.  I have no other use for this area, so this is as good a solution as any.

Besides raking, I hope to get into the garden a little bit to bag my pile of pulled thorny plants and to clear away some more weeds.  The thorny plants in the wildflower patches are a bit more exposed and easier to get to now that most of the wildflowers have died for the season, so I may try to pull some of them out as well.  And away from my property, I'm hoping to get to a local nursery to check it out before it closes for the season at the end of the month.  Looks like it will be a busy weekend, and I'll post and update about how things are progressing tomorrow.

Why Are the Leaves Dull This Year?

A view from the New York welcome center on Route 81 near Binghamton,10/14/12.


I was driving through northeast Pennsylvania and central New York last weekend, right around the time of the fall foliage peak.  The hills were colorful, but unlike other years, I wouldn't say they were ablaze with color.  There was plenty of yellow and some orange, but the red was mostly missing.  The colors weren't as vibrant as I was expecting, either.  The natural question to ask is...why?

First, a quick primer on leaf color.  Most of us remember from middle school biology that leaves are normally green due to a chemical that we call chlorophyll, but it is really a combination of chlorophyll along with another chemical called carotene that does the trick.  (You might have heard of beta carotene, the chemical that makes carrots orange...same thing.)  Chlorophyll absorbs red light from the incoming solar spectrum, while carotene absorbs blue-green and blue light.  What is not absorbed is reflected, and so leaves normally appear to our eyes as green.

But as fall creeps in, a "corky membrane" forms between the branch and the leaf stem.  This cuts off nutrient flow to the leaf, and without nutrients, chlorophyll isn't replenished.  Meanwhile, the carotene, which doesn't need to be replaced, remains in the leaf.  The leaf turns yellow.  The membrane can also lead to the concentration of sugars in the leaf, presumably by cutting off their exit.  These sugars can cause the formation of anthocyanins in some types of trees, and the anthocyanins turn the leaves red.  So the key to the change in the leaves' color is apparently the formation of this "corky membrane" between the branch and the leaf stem, and the changes in chemical compounds in the leaves that result.

But as a meteorologist, I was particularly interested in why the leaves seemed so dull this year...did it have to do with the weather?  Well, chlorophyll is destroyed by low temperatures (at night) and by bright sunshine.  Anthocyanins - which produce those bright reds and purples that I didn't see on my drive - thrive in just-above-freezing temperatures, bright sunshine, and dry weather.  So, based on this, I'd expect that the weather from September to mid-October - and especially whenever the leaves were changing color - was some combination of warm nights, cloudy, and/or rainy.  But was it?

To find out, I looked at the Binghamton, NY National Weather Service office's preliminary records for Scranton-Wilkes Barre and Binghamton.  At Scranton, temperatures averaged about a degree above normal in September and right around normal for the first half of October.  A total of 17 days were clear, while the other 27 days were partly cloudy to overcast.  Twenty-one of the 44 days had measurable precipitation.  So it was relatively warm, cloudy, and rainy.

At Binghamton, the story is slightly different.  Temperatures were just below normal in September and over a degree below normal through the first half of October.  Only 13 of the 44 days were clear, and 24 had measurable precipitation.  So Binghamton was cooler, cloudier, and rainier (it rained more often, but not as much) than Scranton during this time period.

The kicker is the stretch of weather in the first few days of October...about the time that I noticed the leaves first starting to change color in my backyard.  These days (and nights) were unseasonably warm, and the warmth was accompanied by clouds and rain.  For those brilliant purples and reds to form, you need a snap of cold (but not below freezing) and sunny weather...here in central New York, you need a nice Canadian air mass to drop in for a few days.  But this year, we had the opposite in early October, and that's my guess as to why the leaves seemed a bit dull this year.


Sources/For Further Reading:
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/fallcolr/fallcolr.html
http://www.na.fs.fed.us/fhp/pubs/leaves/leaves.shtm
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=bgm  (weather data)

Fall Foliage Fotos

Here are a few pictures from the yard to show that the leaves are now past their peak...

 

Most of the leaves on most of the trees in my yard are yellow:

This tree has been the latest to change color:

This tree has also taken its time to turn:

The leaves in my favorite view, looking upstream from the dock, are getting pretty sparse.  Also, do you see how disturbed the surface of the creek is?  It was awfully windy this morning when I went out to take pictures.

Notice in the downstream view from the dock that all of the leaves in the foreground have fallen off just since late last week.  From the ripples in the creek, you can see that the wind was blowing from downstream to upstream, or approximately from the southwest.

Yard Work 10/14

I was away most of the weekend, but I did manage to get out in the yard for about an hour on Sunday.  Plenty of leaves fell while I was away, so the obvious course of action would be to rake the leaves and either bag them or pile them in the foresty part of my property.  But I had a headache, and raking the leaves has quickly become my least favorite yard activity, so I decided not to follow the obvious course of action.

I still have piles of plants that I pulled out of the ground just sitting in the garden, so I filled a bag with some of those plants.  I had some room left in the bag, so I began to clear out the garden, pulling up some plants/weeds from a random spot along the edge of the garden to fill the rest of the bag.  As seems to be the case every time I pull out plants, I uncovered a surprise.  This time it was a white wood stake that had been left on the ground.  For now, I've moved it to my pile of eyesore - the junk that I've collected from the yard that I'm not sure when/how to get rid of.  (More on the pile of eyesore later this week.)  The stake may be useful, though, so I'm planning to hold onto it.

I'm not very organized about how I go about things right now, I just want to be productive in my time outside.  I still have a large pile of thorny plants to bag and all of those leaves to deal with, but I'll get to that next weekend. An early look at the weather forecast suggests that it may be a showery weekend, but it's still early, so we'll see how things develop as the week goes on.

More Leaves!

I went to the recycling center again this morning to drop off another seven bags of leaves and weeds.  The leaves are still piling up in my backyard...and as you can see, there are some pretty big trees!   It looks like I'll be making 1-2 trips per week for the rest of the month.  I've begun to think about setting up a composting area in the back yard to take care of all these leaves (and eventually provide mulch for the garden), but it would have to be pretty big!

Weekend Yardwork

Saturday wound up being a rainy morning, and it rained Sunday late afternoon, so I didn't get as much done this weekend as I'd hoped.  I did manage to rake the front yard and back yard and bag the leaves in the front yard (8 bags worth, as you can see). 

This morning I took 7 of the bags (as many as could fit in my car) to the county's yard waste center.  This evening I bagged three bags of leaves in the backyard and mowed the lawn.  There are still five or so piles of leaves in the back yard, and the trees still have half of their leaves, at least.  I'm far from done with raking for the season.