North Pole Weather 6/4/12

The sun rose this morning at 3:22, and it will set tomorrow morning at 12:19 for 20 hours 57 minutes of daylight. The rest is twilight, but a fairly bright twilight with sunset/rise colors never fading (if the clouds break up a little.) Noon solar altitude is now 47.7°, and the day length is still increasing by about 6 minutes a day.

3/4 of the vegetable garden as of May 1. The “empty” holes are seeded.

Weather has been showery but relatively warm; enough rain to make long trike rides problematic; not enough total rain to help much with the plants. Of course every time I water, it does rain!

The vegetable garden is ahead of where it’s ever been before by the end of May. All raised beds are planted, and all but one row of the holes along the edge. I think I’ll use the remaining holes for a second seeding of lettuce. (I’ve had good luck seeding beets in the holes, and most of the “empty” holes in the photos are in fact seeded.) I transplanted the lettuce plants into the holes along the outside of the squash bed, planning to harvest them before the squash leaves shade them out.

Dwarf columbines, June 1. They not only are hardy and bloom early, they self-seed with abandon.

The dwarf columbine, strawberries and white violets are in full bloom, as is the spirea. So is the white iris nearest the house, and I spotted the first wild rose last night. I planted most of the flower boxes, tubs and hanging baskets last weekend.

#WriteMotivation final check in:

1. Get the garden going. Given the earlier springs up here lately, I’ll try to get the beans started indoors by April 25 and the squash by April 30; plant outdoors before Memorial Day. Get seeds in before Memorial Day if possible. This will involve getting the hoops to support plastic covers up on all three raised beds.

I didn’t quite get it all in before Memorial Day, but I did get the raised beds dug and the vegetable transplants in Memorial Day weekend. Just about everything else is now taken care of — far earlier than usual.

Spirea, photographed from my emergency exit 6/3/12.

2. Keep up daily blogging using my existing schedule: Alaska weather Monday, review Tuesday, quotation context Wednesday, wild card Thursday, Jarn’s Journal (back history on my sf novels) Friday, Science/technology/health Saturday, and Six Sentence Sunday Sunday.

Done.

3. Keep up Context? Tweets daily @sueannbowling

Done.

4. Put at least two interesting science links a day on Homecoming’s page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Homecoming/109303925759274

11:15 last night. The colors intensified later, though the sun had still not set at midnight.

Done.

5. Get outdoors for at least a couple of hours a day when the weather cooperates, either gardening or tricycle riding.

Done.

6. Read over entire trilogy for flow; put bits on Six Sentence Sunday; find a beta reader or two if possible.

I’d still like a second beta reader, but otherwise done.

5:20 pm, 6/4/12

P.S. it hailed about 5 this afternoon. Most unusual for Alaska–we just don’t have the kind of storms here that I grew up with in Kansas.

Fairbanks Weather 9/26/11

It’s fall—and to prove it we’ll have only 11 hours and 52 minutes of daylight today. The sun rose at 7:45 this morning and it will set at 7:37 this evening – no more attending things that start at 7 pm, unless I can be sure of a ride back. At its highest the sun will be not quite 24° above the horizon, and days are now longer than those everywhere to the south of us..

Officially, we started fall last Friday at 1:05 in the morning, but it wasn’t until Sunday that we got down below 12 hours of daylight. Why? Because sunrise and sunset are defined according to when the top of the sun, not the middle, is just visible on the horizon. To be exact, you actually have to take into account also the fact that the atmosphere curves the path of the light rays slightly, so that the actual position of the sun is always a little lower in the sky than what our eyes tell us. This is only important when the sun is very near the horizon, of course, but at high latitudes, where the sun rises and sets at a very shallow angle, it can make several minutes difference in the time of sunrise and sunset. This also changes the apparent direction of sunset and sunrise – on the day of the equinox the sun actually rose 2° N of due east, and set 1° N of due west.

The weather has, sad to say, caught up with the season. We had a frost Saturday night, and only the hardiest plants are still going strong. I pulled the rest of the beets yesterday, and picked the few beans that were ready, as well as removing the hoses and laying them out to drain. I’m glad I brought in the potted plants last week. Next step? The potato bag.

The native deciduous trees have lost most of their leaves, with the exception of a few golden holdouts, and even exotics like my Amur maple are close to dropping their foliage. The world has changed form green to shades of tan. Even the evergreens are darkening. Good-bye, summer. See you next year.