Feeling The Season Way Ahead Of Schedule Agaiin

Really early for this. Yesterday, March 23, I got to work 
expanding a perennial bed while daffodil shoots 
were poking up nearby. Springs in general do seem
to come a lot earlier than they used to.

 This is anecdotal, but honestly, spring keeps coming so much earlier than I remember as a kid in Vermont. 

The setbacks to the season seem harsher as a result, but there's no denying spring ain't what it used to be  - like in my childhood memories of spring in Vermont during the 1960s and 1970s. 

I was out in my yard in St. Albans, Vermont yesterday. What I was seeing was probably what right about April 10 looked like a few decades ago. It certainly didn't seem like March 23. 

Lots of early perennials were poking up, some already two inches or so tall.  The yard was completely free of snow and the grass in protected corners seemed to have a new sheen of green.  Robins were engaging in ongoing turf wars. The ooze from mud season was just starting to ease a bit. I was actually able to begin work on expanding one of my flower beds. 

I have no illusions it will just be flowers and butterflies and warm breezes through the rest of the season.  Brief excursions back into winter are inevitable, and are in the forecast. (Mondays lows should be in the low teens, highs in the 20s. Brrr!) 

Some springs are, and will always be warmer or colder, earlier or later than others. We'll even have a daily record low temperature here and there, though those are, and will be more rare than record highs. 

Spring, in general, is warmer and earlier than it once was.

I might eat my words, but we'll probably never again have an April like 1972, when only five nights in Burlington stayed above freezing and it got as low as 2 above, still the coldest reading for April on record.. (For comparison, so far this March, nine nights remained above freezing in Burlington).

We also, thankfully, probably will never have a May like 1966, when 11 of the first 14 days of the month saw subfreezing temperatures. 

I wonder, though, what the next weirdly warm spring month will look like.  Will we outdo March, 2012, when we had a week of temperatures in the 70s and low 80s? 

Will we someday have some of the first leaves on the trees in early April?  When I was a kid, the first trees to turn green didn't do so until early May. Now, that usually happens around the third week of April, at least in the banana belt Champlain Valley. 

Sometimes, global warming is referred to as "global weirding."  The extremes get, well, more extreme, or at least more odd.  We've certainly seen that in recent Vermont springs.

In late February, 2017, we saw temperatures in western Vermont reach the low 70s, far higher than anyone had seen so early in the season.  Then, two weeks later, the Pi Day Blizzard dumped close to three feet of snow on those same "mild" towns. 

On April 9, 2019, I saw trees around my  yard sag under the weight of freezing rain. In 2020, another warm spring was interrupted by a snowy Mother's Day.

Last year, spring was way early, with flowers blooming all around my yard on April 20.  By April 21 and 22, five inches of snow had smushed the flowers into the ground and blinding snow squalls swirled around my house.  Two days later, it was warm, snow-free, as if nothing wintry ever happened.

All these changes of course have far broader implications than me just saying "Gee whiz'" to myself in the gardens. 

This is another screwed up maple sugaring season. It started early, but I'm not sure all sugarmakers were ready for it in February.  Then a long warm spell last week probably at least deteriorated the quality of the season, at least for some producers.

Early springs lead to premature blooming of apple trees and grape vines and such. Those crops end up vulnerable to late frosts, which still regularly interrupt these milder springs. 

I've always been particularly in tune with nature, the change of seasons, how the landscape changes day to day.   At the risk of having my Vermont card revoked, winter isn't necessarily my favorite season. The honors go to spring.

The weird springs give me mixed emotions, but most of those emotions are tinged with misgivings. Sure, who doesn't love hints of greenery in a Vermont garden in mid-March?  But then you worry the flowers are coming up too soon, and will get wrecked, like my too-early lilacs did during last April's brief snow and cold.

Flowers around my house are the least of anyone's worries, including mine. Climate change is now affecting everyone.  It will hit is harder in the years to come. How hard is too hard?