Cleaning Up Some Branches

As I pointed out during Looking Ahead Week, the first task of spring is cleaning up the fallen branches and unwanted plants from around the yard.  As you can see in the above photo, there are plenty of dead branches on, leaning against, and fallen below the trees.  In some places, especially around the area where I started the clean-up - that I'm discussing in this post - it was particularly ugly.

The simplest task was simply rounding up the branches that had fallen to the ground and piling them in another part of the yard so I can eventually take them to the county's yard waste collection center.  They accept branches up to 4" in diameter, so most of the branches in my yard can go, even some of the longer, larger ones.

I started this clean-up a couple of Sundays ago, when there was still plenty of snow on the ground.  In some places, it was hard to tell which branches were part of which organism, and whether it was living or dead.  Further complicating things, there were fallen branches sitting on top of or leaning over living ones.  It made for a rather jumbled situation:

The biggest pest seemed to be some vines that I had started to clear out back in the fall.  They're annoying buggers to get out of the ground, with long, straight roots.  The root of the vine below is the approximately foot-long dark brown segment in the center of the photo.

And amid the snow, grass and weeds below, you can see the thin, ropey, tangled vine that I had pulled off of the tree.  The vine grows right next to the tree, intertwining its branches with those of the tree.  As the vine gets thicker, it pulls the tree's branches down.

Here's a look at the trunks of a vine plant (left) and a tree (right) whose trunk is curved to avoid the vine's many branches.

And here's a view from farther out of the two plants.  Now you can see the many branches of the vine, low to the ground on the left, and the curved trunk of the tree on the right.  In the background is a thin, straight-trunked tree.

To end the post, here are a couple of before-and-after shots of the tree showing how much junk I was able to clear out around its base.  Of course, there's still more to clean up...there's a dangling branch that has mostly broken off, and there's the thick vine leaning up against the tree to remove.  But at least much of the rest of the mess is out of the way.

Since this initial clean-up effort, I've gotten back to the yard a couple more times to clear out some other sections.  More on that in the coming days.

Things Grow

Things grow.  Even though we're getting well into fall and the trees are dropping their leaves, there's still enough warmth, sunlight, and moisture for the smaller plants to keep on growing.  I was very thorough in removing the plants from the fringe of the garden and digging to pull up their roots, but still, small green spouts have started to pop up everywhere, just two weeks after getting it cleared (see above).

Elsewhere in the yard, seedlings are fighting through the underbrush and leaf litter and hoping to join their parent trees someday as the elder statesmen of the yard.  Maple trees dominate much of the northeast boundary of my property, and this little seedling is one of several in a relatively small area that is trying to gain a foothold.

I discovered this little conifer while I was clearing out some thorny plants and surveying an edge of my property that I hadn't gotten to before.  He's lucky to have survived with all of the thorny plants around that could have choked him away.  His parent tree is not too far away - one of three evergreens in the yard.  (Sorry, my tree identification is not so good, so I can't tell you what type they are.)

And here is the devil.  Yes, that innocent looking sprig, small and harmless looking, has become the bane of my yard-managing existence.  This is the beginnings of a thorny plant.  In its early stages, it has no thorns, and it climbs straight upward.  Eventually, though, it stretches out, develops those prickly thorns, and overruns everything around it.  Yes, even now, as fall begins to foreshadow winter, the thorny plants are sprouting, growing, reaching out, taking over.  As I said, things grow, and the most aggressive plants, it seems are always growing.

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.