By Bill Felker

Simple attention to the details of nature, as always, helped me keep in sight both my center and my life’s destination and purpose, which was to live skillfully and mindfully each step of the journey. – Stephen Altschuler

The Moon and the Stars

The Cottonwood Cotton Moon wanes to become the Mating Milkweed Bug Moon on June 10 at 5:53 a.m. Even as cottonwood cotton continues to fall, milkweed bugs gather on milkweed to mate in the deeply sweet odor of the new milkweed flowers. Rising in the morning and setting in the evening, this moon passes overhead in the early afternoon, encouraging creatures to feed around that time, especially as the cool fronts of June 10 and 15 approach.

By chore time in the early morning, the sky has moved to the way it will appear on an October evening. Hercules is setting, and the Summer Triangle is shifting into the far west. Pegasus is almost overhead, and the harbingers of winter, the Pleiades, are coming up over the horizon.

Weather Trends

The second week of June always brings an increase in the likelihood for highs in the 90s, and the average percentage of afternoons in the 80s rises above the average percentage for 70s for the first time in the year. Cold 60s are rare, occurring just 5 percent of the time. This week brings more sunshine than almost any other week so far in the year: a full 85 percent of the days have at least partly cloudy skies. New moon on June 10, however, is likely to contribute to a thunderstorm toward the weekend.

Zeitgebers

(Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year)

Chiggers bite near this date; their season lasts through August in the North, well into autumn in the South. Most deer have been born by now. Raccoon young are half grown, rabbits maybe a third.

This is peak fishing time for channel catfish. Painted turtles and box turtles are laying eggs. On Lake Erie, walleye fishing is usually at its best.

Oakleaf hydrangeas, Pokeweed, early seasons hostas, Queen Anne’s lace, larkspur and hollyhocks come into bloom. Acorns have formed in the woods. Droopy lizard’s tail flowers in ponds and streams.

Pie cherries and the earliest black raspberries ripen. Mock orange petals fall.

The violet heads of May’s chives droop and decay. Tall buttercups recede into the wetlands. The blossoms of the scarlet pyrethrums, blue lupines and Siberian iris come apart. Nettles and grasses reach waist high and tangle with catchweed (the catchweed flowers turned to burs). Catalpa flowers fall in afternoon thunderstorms.

Mind and Body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, rises into the 20s under the influence of the new moon, but it then falls toward the single digits, reaching a low of just 3 on June 18.

In the Field and Garden

Cucumber vines for pickles are at the three-leaf stage. This is the average budding date for birdsfoot trefoil in central Ohio and Indiana. Grapes are blossoming throughout the vineyards of northeastern Ohio.

The earliest corn is now 40 inches tall. The first winter wheat is turning gold. Soybeans are normally 80 percent planted, 60 percent emerged. At least half of the tobacco plants are in the field along the Ohio River.

Spray for fleas, lice, ticks, scab mites, screw worms, blow fly eggs and fly maggots on your sheep. Check for scrapie and ringworm, too. Hunt potato leaf hoppers in the alfalfa, corn borers in the corn, mites in the roses. Go after bean leaf beetles in the fields. Cucumber beetles reach economic threshold throughout the region. Sawfly larvae eat the leaves on the mountain ash. Lace bugs cause yellow spotting on sycamores, oaks, and azaleas.

Fertilize roses, asparagus and rhubarb; side dress the corn; cut broccoli, harvest early cabbage. In average years, the first cut of alfalfa hay is almost complete in an average year along the 40th Parallel east of the Mississippi. A minimum of 100 frost-free days still remains in most of the area.

ALMANACK LITERATURE

Picking Potatoes

By Patti Van Scoy, Huron, Ohio

Back in the day, my grandfather had a few fields of potatoes surrounding his home in Milan Township. I was fortunate enough to grow up and live next door to my grandma and grandpa. As a child, in the 1960s, I was always visiting with them, almost daily, and cherish those times so much now.

One of my most memorable times was digging and picking potatoes with my grandpa. I was the oldest grandchild (no boys) and at the age of about 9 or 10, 1966-68, I wanted to be in the field with him. He let me ride on the tractor, as I got a little older, he taught me how to drive the tractor in the fields. At the end of summer, most of the family, men and kids, helped Grandpa pick the rest of the crop, which were then sorted and stored in their basement and for sale to the public.

People laugh at me these days for saying “picking potatoes,” but that’s what we called it. A machine called a potato digger loosened them out of the dirt, so we simply picked them up off the dirt and placed them in bushels. Now here is my favorite memory. Our final pick up one year, it lasted all day into the evening. Grandpa paid all the children $1 for their help, which wasn’t bad for young kids.

He paid me last. I’ll never forget, he gave me a crisp $5 bill, and said, “You’re the only one who helped me all year, and I appreciate it.” I was so proud. I wish I still had that $5 bill. But I have the most treasured thing, “a wonderful memory with my grandpa!”

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Bill Felker’s Daybook for June (with extensive journal entries for every day of the month) is now available. For your autographed copy, send $20 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. Or order from Amazon or from www.poorwillsalmanack.com.

Copyright 2021 - W. L. Felker