Cold, blustery and now I can see some neighbors since the leaves blew off the trees.
We had an old elm down by the creek that blew down yesterday, leaving a 6 foot stump and knocking down some of the perimeter fencing we have up to keep deer out of the garden. Looks like my husband will be out there with the ax instead of going to the gym to work out!
We got four eggs yesterday, 12 hens and four eggs, but that doubles the production we've had since late August. It was a loooooong molt for sure. May mean the winter is going to be severe, I don't know if there is a correlation. Has anyone been keeping track of molt v.s. winter severity?
I know for wooly bear caterpillars, the Old Farmer's Almanac says that the longer the middle brown band, the milder and shorter the coming winter; the shorter the brown band, the longer and more severe winter will be. Check out your wooly bears, have your kids check them out and report in. Get their classmates to do the same, if your child is going to do a science project this could be a neat one for them. Just measure the overall length of the caterpillar and measure the center brown band in centimeters. If you don't have a centimeter ruler, you can use inches, and I'll convert to cms. We'll do a ratio of brown band to overall length. I'm going to have my students collecting data also.
. Tell me the county you live in as we have varying degrees of winter severity across the state.
You can email your data or post it here. My email is
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