Take stock in August:

Count the days,

Measure the harvest,

The hours of sunlight. – Celtus

The Moon and Stars

The First Week of Late Summer

The Soaring Swallow Moon enters its second quarter at 6:07 a.m. on Aug. 5, reaches perigee, its position closest to Earth, at noon on Aug. 10 and then becomes full at 10 p.m. on Aug. 11. Lunar perigee, combined with a full moon, often creates turbulent weather conditions on Earth. Rising in the middle of the day and setting in the middle of the night, this moon passes overhead close to midnight.

Parallel with Sirius, the brightest of stars, Venus rises from the east well after midnight, the brightest of the planets. Mars is high in the southeast in Taurus at that time, preceding the looming constellation, Orion. Jupiter is almost overhead in the southern sky in Cetus. Far to the west in Capricorn, Saturn sets as the other major planets shine in the east.

Weather Trends

The cool fronts of Late Summer ordinarily reach the Mississippi River around Aug. 4, 10, 17, 21 and 27. The waxing moon during the first week of August is likely to encourage stable meteorological conditions conducive to drought and heat. As full moon approaches, along with lunar perigee, expect storms throughout the Plains, the South and the East, and the formation of a hurricane in the Caribbean. By the time the moon enters its final quarter, heat is likely to return until the last high-pressure system of the month, due just as the moon turns new on the 27th.

Zeitgebers: Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year

As Deep Summer comes to a close, ragweed pollen fills the humid afternoons, wood nettle goes to seed in the bottomlands, honeysuckle berries and wild cherries ripen, and hickory nuts and black walnuts drop to the undergrowth.

Blackberries are ready to eat when ragweed blossoms. And the season’s second-last wave of wildflowers – the Joe Pye weed, monkey flower, tall coneflower, clearweed, horseweed, white snakeroot, jumpseed, prickly mallow, virgin’s bower, false boneset, field thistle and Japanese knotweed – bloom in the open fields and along the fence rows.

Golden and purple coneflowers, and red, pink and violet phlox, still rule the gardens. Orange-and-gold-flowered trumpet vines still curl through trellises.  Ephemeral resurrection lilies briefly replace the day lilies, the Asiatic lilies and the Oriental lilies. Mums and stonecrop start to color the dooryards.

In the shade of the woods, leafcup is the dominant flower, touch-me-nots beginning to complement its bloom. Along the lakeshores, arrowhead blossoms as rusty dodder winds through the tattered black raspberry bushes.

Late Summer is flocking time for many birds. The swallows still soar in the afternoon sky as the days shorten, but starlings have come together and often sweep across the fields in great murmurations, their acrobatics a prophesy of autumn.

In the Field and Garden

Sodding and seeding of the lawn is often done before the cooler days of fall. Test soil in your fall and winter garden as well as in the fields where you intend to sow wheat, rye, alfalfa, canola, clover and timothy. 

Cut corn for silage after completing the second and third cuts of hay. Dig potatoes and pick commercial tomato plants clean. Complete harvest of plums, pears, watermelons, blackberries and peaches.

The breeding season opens for your goats and sheep. Consider supplements for the rams and bucks: carrots, oats, bran, iodized salt and good greens are popular additions to feed.

Mind and Body

The S.A.D. Stress Index (which measures the forces thought to be associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder on a scale from 1 to 100) slowly rises from the 20s into the upper 40s this week, thanks to Dog Day heat. Traditional advice works: slow down; increase liquids; avoid stressful situations; stay in the shade.

The Allergy Index 

Estimated Pollen Count

On a scale of 0 to 700 grains per cubic meter. Most of the pollen in the air this month comes from ragweed.

Aug. 1: 35; Aug. 10: 50; Aug. 15: 85; Aug. 20: 160; Aug. 25: 200; Aug. 30: 300

Almanack Literature

The Great Duck Adventure

By Harold Gardener, Pleasant Valley Farm,

Markleville, IN

We moved to the country when Dad bought the farm in September of 1950. It was out in the boon docks with a gravel road and we barely had electricity. We had five rooms and a path. The path led us downhill to the outhouse, but that’s a story for another time.

The highlight for this move to the farm was a neighbor boy named Jimmy Davis. He was older than me. I was 7 and he was 9, and we became close friends. Together we enjoyed many years of great association and did the things that country boys did in the 1950s.We had two creeks that ran through the neighborhood, one through my dad’s farm and another and larger one called Sugar Fork.

Sugar Creek was on the Harry Ruth farm. (He was a third cousin to Babe Ruth). Harry raised everything on his farm, chickens, horses, turkeys and Muscovy ducks, a type of duck from Africa and not an overly friendly waterfowl.

In February of 1955, Jimmy and I were exploring Sugar Fork when we ran on to a big Muscovy Drake. He was out in the middle of a deep part of the creek and swimming in circles. Jimmy looked at me, grabbed an old cable and anchored it in the bank, and said to me: Harold, I’m going to swing out and grab the duck, and when I hit the bank, you grab him and we’ve got him.

With a great heave forward, Jimmy left the creek bank, flew out to the middle of the creek and promptly fell to the bottom of the deep part of it. I ran to the bank and helped pull Jimmy out of the water in the cold February weather. He was shivering something bad, and I helped him get his clothes off and wring them out in the woods. It was probably 25 degrees out when we got his clothes half-way dry. Jimmy sneaked home by way of his back door. As far as I know his aunt and uncle whom he lived with never knew what happened.

It’s been 67 years now since the Great Duck adventure, and we are men now in our later years, both in our 80s. We are still close friends, and when we get together, we always talk about all those great adventures of our childhood in those simpler days of the 1950s and the story of the Great Duck Adventure is always there to remember.

***

Send your memory stories to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. Four dollars will be paid to any author whose story appears in this column.

***

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S SCKRAMBLER

In order to estimate your SCKRAMBLER IQ, award yourself 15 points for each word unscrambled, adding a 50-point bonus for getting all of them correct. If you find a typo, add another 15 points to your IQ.

KASC SACK

KASHC SHACK

KCMSA SMACK

CTSKA STACK

CATC TACK

KACHW WHACK

ICADARC CARDIAC

ACIOMNDE DEMONIAC

CAINAMOTPELK KLEPTOMANIAC

JACKKCALB BLACKJACK

THIS WEEK’S RHYMING SCKRAMBLER

RETTIS

TERHIT

TTTWIER

RTLFTEI

ERTRITF

EITRTGL

TIJRET

NIKTERT

TRLTIE

TRTIBE

Copyright 2022 – W. L. Felker