‘They’ say the full moon has nothing to do with frost.
The old stories say that frost will come with a full moon.
As much as I would like to trust and believe the collection of data, watching as the first frost rolls in every year with a big bright full moon I have to say I have my doubts.
The forecast was for mid to upper 40s. The moon was coming full, but it was going to be warm enough, we’d probably escape frost until late again this year. If we could get past this full moon we should be fine until the next time around.
Without doing any preparations to the garden we went off to do other things. My husband took a tractor over to work the summer fallow. Instead of checking cows earlier in the day, like usual, the kids and I waited until it was time to go pick him up. Get everything done in one trip.
We got to the pasture to find a handful of calves out. They have plenty of grass but have cleaned up the wheat they were grazing and think they are starving. At least that’s my theory. Maybe they sense a bad winter coming and want to com home. Now. I held the gate. The kids took the pickup and chased the calves in, no problem. There was a cow out. I walked her in. The kids took the pickup and went to open the gate. It needed the fence stretcher to get. They managed it all alone. As the cow and I slowly walked the length of the fence towards the gate the whole herd of cows leaped into a gallop alongside up and charged the gate. The kids held it!
The cow and I finally caught up. She turned two fence posts before she got to the gate and plowed through the fence.
The kids and I had the pleasure of fixing fence with the whole herd gathered around to ‘help’. They stoll the hammer from the fencing bucket. They tried to eat everything else, including my daughter as she put on the wire ties.
Finally done there we made it up to check water. Water was good. The herd didn’t come to help us with that.
Leaving, through a different gate, we found wires broke in the gate, wires broke in the fence. This must have been where the calves originally left their pasture for new fields. My son had come along without any shoes. He didn’t know we were going to have to get out of the pickup. Ever. That makes all the trouble obviously his fault. He cursed us.
It was nearly dark when we reached my husband waiting in his tractor at the field. He had been able to get more disking done than anticipated while we fixed cow problems. All squeezed warmly into the cab of the pickup we compared weather forecasts on the drive home. Now they were predicting frost. Not earlier when it would have been easier to do something about it. Once home instead of running to work in the garden we ate a quick late supper and went to bed. The garden would do whatever the garden did.
What the garden did was freeze. With next week predicted to be in the 80s again. As always, an early cold snap followed by warm weather mocking us over the blackened burnt remains of the garden.
But, the frost was kind this time. The garden is only lightly nipped by frost. The pumpkins, of course, and the east side. Why the east side instead of all of it? Looks like we will be roasting and freezing peppers today after all! We should be safe from frost until the next full moon now. Not that that has anything to do with the freezing, not according to ‘them’.
