Frost and Fire 2026

 This morning we had a hard freeze.  29F  And the Dahlias and Zinnias are showing it.  Which is good.  Dahlia cutting and digging may commence.  I am ready for it.  This coming week will be beautiful weather, perfect for dealing with this chore.

The Dahlia flowers are burned so all of the bees are wandering around looking for food and being annoying.

I have been leaving my ornamental peppers out.  One of them is succumbing to the frosts we have had.

There are two that I am considering overwintering.  I moved them against the wall of the house and they have not yet been touched by frost.

It is amazing how the routine of our lives repeats itself year after year.  It is time for the autumn brush fire.  Two years ago we burned on this weekend as well.   Every year we tell ourselves that surely this is the last year we will have enough volume of brush and tree limbs to require burning.   Then the saplings start growing in the brushy areas, and lawn trees need limbing up, or something falls in the lawn.  The next thing we know, we have accumulated a whole lot of brush and the pile begins to grow.

This pile had been growing since July.  It has chunks of punky Ash that was not suitable for firewood, the neighbor's Linden limbs that were lying on the roof, our spruce branches.  We took some time cutting brush and goldenrods away from the wild edges, and then set fire to everything.  It went up in an inferno.  Once the July pile had gotten so big it was going to topple, we began piling brush in other areas so the neighbor could use the forks on his loader to add it to the pile once it began to burn down.  There were a lot of dry leaves in the pile and we had to rake them up out of the lawn.  My husband had mowed around the pile this morning to clear any dead grass or leaves away.

We had almost an inch of rain this past week, but we prefer to burn on a day when the rain is just clearing out so that everything is still wet.  We had large fire extinguishers from the garage on hand, but just to be on the safe side my husband filled the tractor loader full of water and we used watering cans to water down the grass around the fire.  

The grass was drying fast and we didn't want to have to worry about it.

Our high today was 61F (16C) which was vey pleasant weather for sitting around a huge fire.  Winter will be here soon.  I saw this prediction on Facebook this week which says that our winter here in NY should be mild.  That would be fine with me.  The past two winters we have had significant snows which left us shoveling the roofs to be on the safe side.

NOAA released their winter outlook today, highlighted by an exceptionally strong El Nino. The end result favors a general pattern that will likely leave snow-lovers across the Great Lakes & New England disappointed. There is a strong lean toward a relatively warm winter, which theoretically throttles the ability for lake effect snow to contribute.