Poor Will’s Clark County Almanack: Time for strawberry rains

It is Nature’s rutting season. Even as the birds sing tumultuously and glance by with fresh and brilliant plumage, so now is Nature’s grandest voice heard and her sharpest flashes seen. The air has resumed its voice, and the lightening, like a yellow spring flower, illumines the dark banks of the clouds. All the pregnant earth is bursting into life, like a mildew, accompanied with noise and fire and tumult. She comes dripping rain like a cow with overflowering udder. — Thoreau, Journal, May 20, 1856

The Almanack Horoscope

Moon Time: The Mock Orange Moon wanes throughout the period, becoming new Strawberry and Raspberry Moon at 2:44 p.m.on May 25.

RELATED: Springfield weather

Sun Time: By May 21, the sun reaches a declination of 20 degrees nine minutes, that's almost 90 percent of the way to summer solstice. The period between that date and July is the most stable solar time of summer

Planet Time: Saturn can be found along the southern horizon after midnight.

Star Time: By this time in May, Cassiopeia has moved deep into the northern night sky behind Polaris, and Cepheus, which looks a little like a house lying on its side, is beginning to come around to the east of Polaris. When Cepheus is due east of the North Star, then it will be the middle of July. When it lies due south of Polaris, then the leaves will be turning. When it lies due west of Polaris, winter will have arrived.

Weather Time: The May 20 Front: The days surrounding this front are some of the most turbulent of May, often marked by rain, tornadoes and high winds. The May 20th system also brings the threat of frost to the northern tier of states, but it typically spares tomatoes and eggplant below the 40th Parallel.

The May 24 Front: The days following the arrival of this front are often unseasonably cold. Even though more than half of May 25ths and 26ths are in the 70s or 80s, a full 40 percent are not, creating the highest potential for chilly conditions since the 15th.

ERIC ELWELL: Major pattern change bringing taste of summer to region

Zeitgebers: Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year: When hummingbirds arrive at your feeders, look for thrushes, and scarlet tanagers to arrive, too, and when you see strawberries coming into full bloom, wild cucumber will be sprouting along the rivers.

Summer phlox are almost two-feet tall as catbirds arrive in the bushes. And when azaleas lose their petals, morel season is about over for the year, and swallowtail butterflies come looking for bleeding heart flowers.

Field and Garden Time: When the canopy of leaves is complete, then flea beetles attack beet greens in your garden. Aphids multiply on heliopsis. Damselflies and dragonflies hunt the ponds. Leafhoppers, corn borers and armyworms assault the crops. Flies are bothering the cattle, ticks roam the brambles, cricket song grows louder, and the earliest fireflies flicker in the lawn.

When you see mayflies by the water, spitbugs will be making their spittle shelters in the parsnips, and the first cut of hay will be underway. Chives bloom in the garden and lilacs reach full flower; that’s when crappie fishing peaks in the shallows. When wood sorrel blossoms in the garden, hunt for rare, medicinal golden seal blooming in the woods.

Marketing Time: Memorial Day is the 29th. Prepare wreathes and flower baskets for farmers' markets and your roadside stand.

WEATHER: WHIO Interactive Radar

Mind and Body Time: The horoscope for planting is ideal this week: Under the darkening moon, seed metabolism is higher in plants, and sprouting improves; hamster activity has been shown to increase, too. Human metabolism may rise as well. Bleeding is often heavier under the new moon, so be extra careful castrating new kids and lambs. Lunar lore and at least one study suggest that more females than males are born under the new moon.

Creature Time: The waning moon will be overhead in the morning this week, making that time the best lunar time of all for catching fish, scouting for game and looking for migrating songbirds. The cool fronts of May 20 and 24 should improve fishing as they approach; however, after they pass through, fishing often feed less. Birders could find or hear nightbawks, Acadian flycatchers, yellowthroats and more warblers.

Journal

May 20, 1996: Spring has finally come. The cold and gray disappeared three days ago, and highs have been in the 80s and 90s. Poppies and iris are out in town. Strawberries have large green fruit now, some blushing. Comfrey is budding. The east garden is at its best, with the columbine and late azaleas and bleeding hearts, dwarf iris, dead nettle. Rockets and buttercups and deep red pyrethrums are blossoming in the south garden. The daisies are about to open (have already seen some in town). Along the west wall today, the clematis bloomed, three purple flowers all at once. In the woods this evening, soft glow of dusk and violet rockets, wild phlox, honeysuckle. Found the rich scented four-petaled flowers of the silver olive. The woods floor is speckled with tiny petals from the locust trees above.

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