tamarack

Can't judge the size of that mesh from the pic. Is it small enough to keep out small rodents? When I planted our fruit trees I made cages from 1/4" hardware cloth.

With 2 outs, Mike Trout, hitless in his last 18, pops one way up, and it's perfectly placed between 3 defenders. Then Ohtani curls one around Pesky pole.

As we left church in Farmington the whole western sky was inky dark. Over the next 4 hours the skies stayed fairly dark and I heard a couple of distant rumbles, or at least thought I did. Not a drop and the echoes are all east of here or hundreds of miles west.

Deer love chestnut shoots.

Most of the smallies I kept came from Seboeis Stream, about 40 miles north of BGR, and the crawdad feast apparently (judged by smallie tummies) continued throughout the warm season. A rocky stream bed offers wall-to-wall crawfish habitat and the bass know it.

I've never heard anyone say that (yet), but maybe it's because the blackflies are generally at their worst. (In the north part of NNE, they would then be "Juneflies.)

The yellow birch near the house is covered with catkins like those. White pine flowers just starting to show - looks like yellow/green coatings coming in a week or two.

About the same here, though the blackflies are at peak and mosquitos also out in force. Wore a chamois shirt while jacking up the toolshed and getting the cedar logs beneath it. Kept the skeeters from slipping their straw thru a t-shirt. Way too much clothing, lots of sweat, but I despise bug dope (though I always carry it when in the woods at work - can tolerate a lot more bugs if the antidote is in my pocket..)

Every smallmouth I've caught and kept that had food in its stomach had one or more crawfish, sometimes with other items as well. Have not killed a smallie in more than 40 years but I'd guess their dietary habits haven't changed since then.

A couple years before I moved north in 1976 to work for Seven Islands, one of their techs was driving his sled back toward his truck, using the track he'd broken on the unplowed road while riding in several hours earlier. Turned a corner and there was a cow moose standing on the track - much preferring the now-firmed snow to the belly-deep powder off to the side. He began yelling at the moose and inching the sled closer, until the hair stood up on the moose's neck and she headed in. The fellow dove off into the deep stuff and wallowed away from the road while mama moose pretty much destroyed the cowling of the sled before wandering into the woods, fortunately on the opposite side from where the guy had gone. So he picked up the larger pieces and continued on his way with a story to tell.

Not a bear expert, but bears coming out of hibernation will sometimes tear into trees to get at the high-nutrient cambium layer. However, they've probably been out of their dens for a month or more - seems odd they would still be breaking trees now for that reason. Unless there was some critter in the tree that the bear was trying to catch, I don't know why the it did that. About the halfway point of leaf-out. Maple leaves are nearly full size, oaks approaching half and ash/basswood buds are open and shoots elongating. On another subject, sun is back out after about 2 minutes of RA+. More little pop-ups upstream.

Seems odd that my area in west-central Maine is now white. It was in the yellow right after April ended and we've had only 0.67" in May, <50% of normal and not the way to bury Stein. Maybe the April 30 rain wasn't part of the earlier map?

Common sense? Compassion? Maybe a touch of selfishness: A couple years back a young man who used to go to our church was doing a wheelie with a heavy bike when the back wheel caught on the pavement and flipped the machine on top of him. No helmet, brain damage, coma for weeks, they had to remove part of his skull, PT for months. His recovery was almost miraculous but a few days ago he fell down stairs (I'm guessing his earlier injuries contributed) and his right side now isn't working right. I think all that medical treatment runs well into 6 figures, maybe 7, and its bottom line comes from my insurance and yours. I'm not a fan of loud bikes either. Aren't you a big time snowmobiler? They are pretty loud too, just saying. Of course the sleds are usually out in the puckerbrush, not roaring down the street in front of one's house.

So do I. The D's nominee in 2016 was the only person who could potentially lose to Trump. The R's nominee was the only person who could potentially lose to HRC.

Another problem inherent with frost pockets is that the cold can be capricious - a bit of wind or cloud can make 10° difference. Median growing season here is 114 days but it's ranged from 88 days to 156. We've had June frosts in 6 of 23 springs with all other late frosts in May. Only one year (2011) has failed to bring a September frost..

We learned that our site is not one that's friendly to iffy-in-zone species, notably with Reliance peach. Planted one in 1998 a week after moving there on 5/15, then a taller one in early May 1999. That 2nd one was destroyed by a freeze a week after the transplant, while the earlier tree would triple in size each growing season (peaches are precocious) then mostly die back each winter. In 01-02 the temp never dropped below -12 and that spring we had hundreds of blossoms (1st we'd seen) and 100+ delicious fruits. 02-03 had a dozen mornings with minima -20 to -29, some with wind, and the tree was finished - got a weak sprout from beneath the graft and it didn't even survive the summer. Very glad we got to eat some peaches (along with blueberries, my favorite fruit) before learning that a zone 5 species would not do well in our zone 4 cold spot.

We do live there - 31° this morning. Last frost here has ranged from May 2 (2011) to June 12 (2004) and the median is May 24, so a frost on May 13 is nothing out of the ordinary.

Maine may have more bears than any other state in the lower 48 (WA and WI are also up there), but from the news it seems my old haunts in NNJ have more bear/people issues than here in the north. It's not the bears . . . (And I at PF's millennial/old bear comparison.)

You finished in 31st place on the snow table - ouch! Makes my 17th place look downright spectacular.

That works well if folks in the same business in the area do the same. If you're the only one who is grossly understaffed, such that opening the treasure chest is the only way to gain employees, the choices my be grim - jack up your prices and risk having much of your clientele leave for cheaper pastures or maintain prices and watch the expense/revenue ratio turn upside down. Or maybe one finds a way to make their product more attractive.

Our 2 went in opposite directions but ended up circling back to the same place, sort of. Our son did not have a good experience up thru HS, out of the in crowd, indifferent/resistant student, until - he learned between Jr and Sr year he could cram extra classes and gain enough credits to graduate in a half year. Made the honor roll for the one and only time. Asked about college, his reply was "I've done 12 years in these prions; I'm not signing over for another 4." And then was gone, getting away from those "crummy downeasters" and moving to San Francisco (where he found some crummy people, unsurprisingly.) A few moves and some time in the Navy and then he enrolled in a CA community college, moved to Queens and earned a 4-yr degree at Hunter College and wound up teaching English in Japan, now in his 18th year there. Daughter did the orthodox HS to college, got 2 English degrees which helped her to get a job teaching 11th-grade English and zeroed out her college loans. Now she's teaching her kids, with major help from our SIL, so no serious bumps when COVID arrived. We just found it ironic that 2 kids with exact opposite K-12 experiences - model student vs. rebel - both were teaching English. Though not in quite the same circumstances.

Of my 3 apple trees the Empire is poorest at converting blossoms to fruit - was also the last to begin flowering despite being the biggest of the three. Its (rare) fruit is very good and the one scabby little apple from there was the year's entire 3-tree crop last year. The Ultramac alternates between good-not-bumper crops and near nothing (last year) and the fruit is excellent. The Haralred was planted in 1999, a year after the other two, and has been the most severely pruned including removal of one of 2 equal forks about 10 years ago. I thought sacrificing half the tree was better than a paste-bomb split; April 2020 would've been a candidate, or perhaps the super crop of 2017 would've done it. The fruit is harder and a bit more tart than the Ultramac and takes a morning or two in the upper 20s to rein in that tartness. I've occasionally stuck some tree spikes into the ground, but apart from pruning have done no other culturing - no bug/scab/disease treatments. Most apples have some minor defects but they don't affect the flavor and the worst end up as applesauce or apple butter.

Aroostook has certainly been rewriting the record book for high max and min in recent years. Farmington co-op has an odd pattern for 21st century record warmth. In the cold season new maxima are common while mild minima much less so. Even with last December's mild mornings, 2000-onward has 4 high minima records and 12 high maxima. The opposite occurs in the warm season, with a roughly proportional amount of high minima records but few record high maxima. Exactly one record high has been set during met summer since 1988, just squeaking under the bar on August 31, 2010. The only time the site has reached 95 this century was 9/9/02 and last June's 94 was the hottest since then, though 5 days have reached 93 since 2002. Makes me wonder if the trees in the obs site vicinity are having an increasing effect.

Back in my days at UMaine an instructor said 400' elevation was like 1° of latitude - 70 miles poleward. Some years back there was a thread here discussing that ratio, and folks thought 500 or even 600' per degree was more reasonable. However, a few hundred feet certainly makes a difference, as others have noted. Some events that dropped 1-2" of slop here at 395' would produce 6" paste 5 miles south on Mile Hill up near 800'. In 1983 we visited a long-time friend in Blairstown, NW New Jersey, and had a deformation band dump 13" in about 8 hours on April 23, rather late in the season. That was at 1200' and driving was a challenge. 500' lower in town it was 4-5" of slop that couldn't stick on the pavement.

Haralred blossoms beginning to open. Empire and Ultramac usually 4-5 days later. That Haralred is showing thousands of blossom buds, its usual abundance and welcome after it had absolutely none (I looked very carefully) last year. Guess it just needed a rest.