Greetings and welcome!
It has been a very unusual fall this year. We are much warmer than normal, and pretty wet as well. We still have not had our first frost or freeze yet.
There are several places that this matters. First of all it was not a good year for fall colors. The maples never really went off and got super colorful like they usually do. The just looked drab and fell off quickly.
Some people attribute this to the fact that we have been warmer than normal and we never had really cool nights. Other people suggested that it had to do with the rainfall amounts earlier in the year. Personally I would subscribe to the no cold nights theory. Whatever it was they never showed their brilliant colors before dropping, and they went really fast.
For the most part the peak color is long gone. When we went leaf peeping on Sunday the 3rd the colors were nice but not quite at peak. Last Sunday the best of them were gone. It wasn’t much of a peak season… maybe a day or three?
There are still fall colors coming with the oaks and other late species, but there are a lot of bare trees now.
There are some other unusual things happening this fall. The first is the mushrooms. There are an abnormal amount of them right now. There are the classic white ones, but they are both huge and plentiful. There are also the ones that look like a potato and are slimy when you step on them. There are a lot of lesser varieties here and there that you wouldn’t expect to see.
I know very little about mushrooms and fungi and don’t even like them on pizza, so I have no idea what these are. I can tell you that I took all of these pictures within about 2 minutes walking around the house.
These nice white ones are very common. I think that I counted at least 7 of them in the bottom picture.
The next item is that the insect kingdom has not been knocked down much since we haven’t had frost yet. The yellow jackets were very common this year and they still are. I don’t know why they are so curious but they have been very inquisitive around me. Several have become one with my roof and house paint. The Asian lady beetles are still around and will likely swarm again on the next warm sunny day. I even had a mosquito in the car yesterday.
I am happy that it has been warm late this year, but between the rain days and life’s constant interruptions I am still way behind where I need to be with outside jobs. With November only a couple of weeks away they have taken top priority. I still have inside work from August and September to catch up on. It rained last night and it is too wet to work this morning so I am getting a head start on this week’s update today.
The weather has been goofy this fall and I think that we will be in for some more. We have a fairly strong LaNina forecast for this winter. I am not sure what that means for weather yet. Last year was a LaNina year and it was terrible for snowmobiling. Sometimes it goes the other way. I just don’t know what to think about that yet. The fact that we might be waiting until October 16th for our first frost tells me that it will likely be an interesting year.
Time for me to get back to work. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB