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Garden Guru

 Winter and Leaves

Jim Boxberger Jr.
Posted 10/1/21

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder, so are you ready for winter? Squirrels and chipmunks have been running around my yard for the past month like they just had a double …

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Garden Guru

 Winter and Leaves

Posted

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder, so are you ready for winter? Squirrels and chipmunks have been running around my yard for the past month like they just had a double espresso.

I haven’t seen too many woolly bear caterpillars yet to see what they say about winter, but I have been listening to some meteorologists that study the weather for a living. No, not Jim Cantore on the weather channel, the people that Jim Cantore turns to when he wants to get the heads up on what is going to happen one, two or six months down the road.

WeatherBELL Analytics is a company that crunches all the data relating to weather patterns around the world and forecasts what that will mean for the upcoming seasons. If you are not a fan of winter, you will not be happy with what the prediction is like for this year. Starting by the end of October snow should start blanketing the northwest which will help to cool the jetstream by one to three degrees.

Seems like a small amount, so what is the big deal? That one to three degrees will start a chain reaction across the midwest and eventually into the northeast whereby storms that would normally bring a half inch of rain at a temperature of thirty-three degrees will instead bring six inches of snow at a temperature of thirty to thirty-two degrees.

Joe Bastardi, one of the Chief Forecasters for WeatherBELL, predicts that about two to three weeks after there is snow cover in the northwest, we will start to see snow here. And this is not just a snowstorm, it is a winter pattern of weather that almost matches 1955 week for week since early May.

Now I wasn’t even around in 1955, so I will have to take his word for it, but I have seen some pictures of my father and aunt by some very big snow piles around that time in Liberty and Briscoe. Time will tell if this forecast will come to fruition or not, so keep an eye on the northwest in October.

Meanwhile around Sullivan County the leaves are dropping fast. Most are not even changing color, they are just shriveling up and dropping. I fear we may not have a great leaf peeper season this fall at all. And with the leaves falling that too will add to the colder nights as the leaves help to hold in the warmth of the day just like clouds do.

Leaves are such good heat keepers that you should never throw your leaves away. Every fall we sell these yard composter bags so that you can collect your leaves and then take them to the trash. What a waste, leaves are a great way to protect your plants for winter by using them to mulch around the base of your plants or chop them up and use as fertilizer.

Chopped leaves, when roto-tilled into the garden will help to break up hard soil, act as food for earthworms and decay to produce organic fertilizer for your garden. If you chop your leaves up with your lawn mower a few times, they even make great fertilizer for your yard, but it is the chopping that is the key.

Chopping helps the leaves break down faster. If you let whole leaves lay on your lawn all winter, they will suffocate the grass underneath and promote the development of snow mold.

This time of year I end up mowing more for mulching leaves than cutting grass, but either way my lawn is happy. So chop your leaves and keep an eye on the northwest.

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