A Creature of Light

Autumn is a time of long shadows.
(Margo D. Beller)

This year, we turned back the clock before going to sleep on Halloween night, a night where the moon was full for the second time in a month (a blue moon), three planets were easily seen (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars) and one could be seen with binoculars (Uranus). 

With the start of November 2020 we are on standard time. We get an extra hour to use. Many might not want more time in a terrible year of natural and man-made disasters. I know a few hardworking people who likely used the time for well-deserved sleep. I thought I would be doing the same after a lot of activity the day before. Instead, I used this gift of time to sit on the enclosed porch, watching the feeder birds and listening to the silence at first light.

I feel the lack of that extra sleep. Halloween started with temperatures in the upper 20s, our first hard frost of the year. As it happened, I had errands to run. In my travels I saw roofs, shrubs and lawns white with the frost. At home, as expected, the sub-freezing cold put an end to the coleus plants and the dahlias I had in pots in the front yard and dulled the foliage of the cannas. I also discovered at least one deer had, yet again, found a weakness in the deer netting and had gotten a head in to chew on what plants it could grab. 

So I spent much of the day lugging pots from outside to inside and repairing deer netting after I cut back enough of the plants in the front of this particular area to make it harder on the deer should they try again.

Dahlia tubers, 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

The cannas were moved to their winter home - the garage - and stored in a dark area once I cut off the foliage. The dahlias were moved to the enclosed porch where the plants were cut back and the tubers dug out of the pot so they could dry before being stored. The dead coleus plants were pulled, the pot moved to the porch and the four cuttings I had rooted were planted. The pot is now in the sunny front room until it is warm enough to go outside again next year. All the cut plant matter went into the compost pile.

By the time I finished all that and even some raking I was very sore and tired. Why push myself to finish that very day? Several reasons. Halloween was the first bright, sunny day in a long time and, while still cold, I was happy to be working in the sun. Also, rain was expected Sunday (it is raining now, as I write).

And it will be dark at 5 p.m., the down side of getting that extra light in the morning.

That is why I rose at 5:45 a.m. I can be exhausted, I can go to bed late but when light starts to creep into my room, I wake up. Just yesterday I would've seen this light at 6:45 a.m., and I am still adjusting to it being an hour earlier. But it was silent at 5:45 a.m. standard time, too early for many to walk or jog with or without dogs on a Sunday morning.

Female purple finch (Margo D. Beller)

The feeders went out at first light and were immediately visited by black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice and a visitor from the north, the purple finch. Unlike the more common house finch, these have a distinctive "eyebrow" - white for the brownish female, pinkish for the male. The purple finch isn't really all that purple, more like raspberry (which is how Roger Tory Peterson describes it in his field guide). 

These finches are irregular visitors, once a lot more common until the house finches started pushing them out of many areas, such as my part of suburbia. Maybe because they don't show up at my feeders as often, the other small birds, even the pugnacious white-breasted nuthatch, leaves them alone. Only when a large bird such as a jay comes at it will the purple finch move. It is a bit bigger and chunkier than the house finch and it has taken me many years to be able to know one when I see it. 

Autumn scene, Westbrook Preserve
West Milford, NJ, October 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

This year there have been many reports of other irregular visitors from the north - pine siskins (I had three the other week) and evening grosbeaks. The grosbeaks, like all the finches (house, purple, goldfinch and their larger cousin the cardinals), will sit and eat until all the seed is gone unless something forces them to leave. Now that the southbound autumn migration is over, for the most part, finding a bird that considers my part of the country warm enough to stay for the winter is thrilling.

The fact 2020 is looking like an "irruption" year should not have surprised me in this year of the coronavirus pandemic at a time when New England has already been hit with heavy snowfall, when we are learning the Greek alphabet thanks to a record number of named storms, when much of the west has seen a record number of wildfires. These birds are looking for food, just like the warblers and others that passed through New Jersey on their way south for the winter. Just as my apple tree produced fewer fruits and the locust tree produced fewer seed pods, the cone seed crop in Canada was poor this year. It has been that type of year.

Luckily for me, sitting in my coat with my steaming cup of coffee at first light, birds don't have to worry about travel restrictions.

Lettuce Start the Growing Season

It usually takes me a few days to a week to get used to the changes in the light caused by the start of Daylight Savings Time. Just as the light started waking me at 6:30 am, we changed the clock ahead and now I am back to rising after 7am, or in the dark before then. Now the daylight lasts until close to 7pm, which would be great if I was doing things outside, such as working in the garden. However, despite one or two days of above-average temperatures, it has generally been too cold to do any work outside aside from adding to my brush pile.

Optimism (Margo D. Beller)

And yet, going to the local Agway to replenish my seed and suet supplies, I bought a package of lettuce seeds.

I grew lettuce in a planter years ago and it did rather well considering I planted it at the wrong time of year. But the other year I tried again at the right time of year and the seeds did not germinate. I have since learned lettuce seeds have a short shelf life.

But I wanted to try again. I was tired of paying a lot of money for organic lettuce sold by a local farmer (using a protective tent) at the winter farm market this past season or buying less-than-satisfactory lettuce from who-knows-where at the supermarket. MH will eat lettuce on his sandwiches and it is another good way of getting him to eat greens. The cost of a package of seeds is cheaper than buying seedlings, even if not all the planted seeds germinate.

Lettuce, I am told in my reference books, is one of the easiest plants to grow. You can get two crops - planted in early spring, it grows into the summer; planted in late summer, it grows into the early winter. Lettuce likes the cold.

Nowadays I like trying to plant things as a way of coping with an over-mechanized and -technical society. If successful, I grow food. If not, I learn what not to do for next time. If successful growing lettuce, I may try other crops that cost a lot to buy at the farm markets such as chard and spinach.

Mainly I am feeling the itch to get my hands dirty. Although the thought of the spring cleanup work I'll have to do tires me, seeing the daffodils and other early bloomers poking their noses above the soil gives me incentive to make them more visible. I want to finally put the pepper pots back outside. I want to plant the dahlias I've stored in the garage.

I want the warmer weather so I can use those longer daylight hours productively, working in the garden and looking for birds. Soon enough the migrants will be passing through on their way north.

My brother-in-law in NH is waiting for the sap to start rising in his maples so he can start on this year's sugaring. I notice the maples in my yard have begun flowering, putting red coloring against the blue sky. Maybe the sap is starting to rise in me, too.