tamarack

Didn't reach 80 in Augusta, thanks to clouds, and the line of showers is on the doorstep.

TOR warning for Lincoln, NH and environs - storm looks to be coming straight down Rt 116 from Kinsman's Notch. Would losing 1,000+ ft elev in a dozen miles keep a funnel from touching ground, or have no effect? Nice line of showers moving into central Maine from the mts, though all the pretty colors separated and went N & S of the home front - doubt if we got more than a tenth or so.

Ever had Gifford's? (preferably at one of their Maine stores) Still mostly overcast at Augusta. Dews are rising but it will take a real blast to approach 90 here. At home had 0.03" before 7 from the warm front, with some more colorful echoes to the north.

I'd guess that it's not big enough, and wxeyeNH's reply is on target. Some chestnuts planted on the Hebron public lot (about 10 miles NW of dryslot) had nuts when about 4" diameter and less than 20 feet tall, so the one in the pic won't need to get all that much bigger. (Alas, all those older Hebron trees succumbed to the blight, and the 10 seedlings that I helped plant nearby some 15 years ago are apparently gone as well. )

Classic American chestnut sprouting after the above ground stem was killed by the blight.

On the WCI thread (Lakes/OV subforum) I noted having read a book titled "-148", about an attempted winter ascent of Denali that failed due to a huge windstorm. At one point a veteran bush pilot flew up hoping to check on the climbers, and reported a near "hover" above one spot while his airspeed indicator read 140 kt. Don't recall what the temps were at the climber's hiding place at the time. (And my read was years before the current WCI was developed.) That PF-posted video was wild. I thought the one serious dust devil I've seen was intense because it carried one of those waist-high ashtray thingies about 1/4 mile to the far side of a small lake, the black can describing circles in the air all the way. This one blows away that 1966 event. (Pun intended.) Edit: Two mistakes in the top paragraph. 1st is that book's title is "Minus 148" - try searching what I wrote above and you'll get the runaround. 2nd is that the team actually summited, 1st ever winter ascent, and got caught by the storm while descending, and still high up. The 1st edition of the book is dated 1969 (I read it in 1974 or 75), and Denali has been climbed several more times during winter since then, including a solo ascent a few years back.

PWM's coldest (midnight obs, so those 1/17 and 1/18 lows are 2 different mornings.): -39 2/16/1943 -31 2/15/1943 (My earlier -32 was an error.) -26 1/19/1971 -25 2/3/1971 -22 2/2/1961 -22 2/13/1967 -22 1/17/1971 -22 1/18/1971 4 @ -21: 1/24/48 to 1/20/1971. (No surprise that Jan 1971 is their coldest month on record.) I'm 99.9% sure that no other coastal site in the lower 48 has gotten colder than that -39. Even in AK, I think one would need to go north of the Aleutian Peninsula to find a colder morning.

Because NH has a station atop its tallest peak and AK does not? Disappointing 0.1" overnight. However, it's been showering since 11 AM, and probably dumped another 0.2" or so. Baby steps, especially since there's nothing on tap during the next 3 warm days.

I suspect this was a Northeast-based cold wave. The winds never quit during the coldest days (Jan 14-15), suggesting backside winds from a strong LP. Many record low maxima were measured during those two days. Seeing all the Jan 1985 WCI records reminds me that NNE missed the worst of that huge polar dome, catching only the fringes. Lows for that month in N. Maine were in the -20 neighborhood, modest for that area. However, we never sniffed 32; most locales had month's "warmest" in the mid - or even low - twenties. Dendrite's links included the brief but shockingly cold Feb 1943 blast. The cold for that one was centered well south of places like PQI. NYC touched -8, their 3rd coldest morning on record and 6° colder than anything since, and PWM - a stone's throw from salt water - reached an amazing -39, probably in flat calm. Their coldest WCI for that period would more likely have been the evening before. After a subzero afternoon (about -5, though the day's high was -2 at 12:01 AM) the temp plunged to -32 at 11:59 PM. Their 3rd coldest day was -26, in Jan 1971.

Some places just aren't suitable for warm-weather crops. The owner of a large logging outfit in NW Maine, with an office is just to the American side of the border across from St.-Pamphile, PQ, lost his tomatoes 4th of July week 4 straight years before throwing in the towel. It was a flat at 1,000' with gentle hills both east and west to allow the cold to gather right at the garden. When we lived on the flats in Ft. Kent, we saw flakes in both June and August, and a frost on 7/31/78 - singed my pumpkins and killed the beans next door. Taters, carrots, all the crucifers should be okay, but for tomatoes, peppers, squash, cukes, some sort of season-extending shelter is probably required.

Could be BWA, though it's usually more of a problem at lower elevations. It feeds on the needles, so I'm not sure if the stuff on the bark is related. Having said that, I agree that the number of "orange" fir seems higher this year that usual, and it's not always the larger/older ones as I'd expect - fir is a short-lived species so some of the older ones usually die each year. It's not spruce budworm, as populations in the US, though increasing, remain sufficiently low so that their feeding isn't noticeable. Unlike eastern Canada, PQ in particular, which is getting hammered. Farthest south I've seen fir in Maine is around mile 12 of the turnpike. However, I've noted a few along I-84 in NE PA, in the higher hills between Matamoros and Scranton.

A now-retired co-worker who lives a few miles west of CAR had (probably still has) a medium-size greenhouse. He'd overwinter tropical stull like lemon trees and bananas inside, then move their big pots out during the warm wx - had some nice lemon crops, but after 3 years with no fruit the banana was abandoned to the frost one autumn. He grew better melons up there than I could when I lived south of Augusta, but he also really worked at it. He'd spend entire weekends transplanting seedlings into peat pots, both for his own garden and to sell at farmers' markets. One summer when his 2 girls were in 1st/3rd grade, back around 1990, they were selling cukes 3-for-a-quarter from their front yard, and made over $200.

For some reason (I'm sure it's been well researched), the blight doesn't seem to affect the below-ground portion of American chestnuts, and as many folks have seen, that species' ability to remain viable and resprout is awesome. Oaks are great at resprouting, too, though I don't know if they could handle decades beneath a plow layer. However, the charcoal industry in SNE lived off oak sprouts (fancy term is "coppice management") - cut one tree and get 5-6 new ones growing like gangbusters, and for charcoal one needed neither huge stems nor nice straight, limb-free ones.

Not a huge pine pollen year here - though there's plenty it's not like 2 years ago when it looked like there might be enough to shovel. Worst pollen I ever saw was from red spruce, at Gardner Pond, some 25 miles SW from Ft. Kent. The stuff formed a bathtub ring on the lee shore that was 2 feet wide and 2-3" thick. Temps were quite warm and all that organic stuff began to stink.

And many cities chose to replace those dying elms with Norway maple. Lose-lose.

Another near miss for frost - probably was a repeat of Sunday's low of 35, after yesterday's 34. Though we've been as low as 28 in June here (6/4/2002), this is the first 4-day run of sub-40 minima, and with 6 such mornings, June 2018 trails only 2004 (8) for such cool dawns.

I would not prune it, as even the tiny wounds on that small tree would offer an opening for the spores. Near that Topsham lot I found years ago a healthy chestnut 7-8" in diameter on a private lot. A couple years later I saw that, during a timber harvest, that tree had been pruned on one side to make room for a logyard, and was stone dead. I can't help thinking that all those wounds led to its demise. Another example is some chestnuts planted adjacent to the Maine Forest Service entomology lab in Augusta in 1969. For nearly 30 years they grew straight, tall (60'+) and unblemished, until they lost many of their limbs in the 1998 ice storm. In two years all were dead. I've read that the fungus can live on oak trees without harming them, thus keeping the disease present. One of my co-workers (now retired) found some chestnut on a public lot about 25 miles NNW of BGR, AFAIK the most northerly natural-origin specimens in the Northeast. He had patchcuts made to the south of several of the larger trees (12-17" diameter) to encourage their regeneration. The tactic has succeeded, but the largest and (formerly most vigorous) of the overstory chestnuts has been blighted. Those half-dozen or so chestnuts were in closed-canopy forest probably dozens of miles from any other of their kind, and upwind of them all.

Did not look at the max-min, but the indoor-outdoor was cooler than yesterday when the other instrument touched 35. No frost on vehicle roofs, but the max-min is 10 feet lower and blocked from the sun, which had been up for nearly an hour and was hitting those roofs when I ventured outside. Complaining of a cold May? Perhaps in rainy SNE locales, but up here it was as nice a May as I can recall, except for those trying to garden in the dust. Though the morning lows were right on the 20-year average here, daily highs were +5 and 2nd highest of those 20 years. Available sunshine, measured crudely by adding days I rate as "sunny" to 1/2 of "PC" days, was also #2, and 2 days higher than the warmest May.

Most abundant species on my 62 acres of forest: Red maple, balsam fir, white ash, brown ash, in that order. The two ash species are about 20% of the volume but probably more than 1/3 of actual trees, with brown ash nearly pure (some RM) on some wet acres. Not looking forward to the arrival of EAB. Nice looking chestnut, though the form looks more Chinese than American - bushy for max nut production. Hope it and the smaller one (how do you keep the deer from destroying it) continue to prosper. The vigor of chestnut stumps/roots is amazing. In January 1989 we thinned a 30-year-old white pine plantation on the state lot in Topsham (midcoast.) Prior to the pine being planted in Sept 1959, that 15 or so acres had been a market garden ("Best turnips in Maine!") for at least 20 years before that - furrows remain visible even now after last winter's 2nd thinning. I set up some growth plots after the 1st thin, and when I did the remeasure in October 1989, there was a 5-ft-tall American chestnut in one of the skid trails. The only way such a tree can achieve that height in one season is from sprouting, and in this case the sprouts had to originate in whatever roots or stump fragments that were beneath the plow depth, 50+ years after the land was cleared and plowed, those fragments retained enough vigor to produce that tall sprout, and once started, the tree grew amazingly well through 2010, reaching 50'+ tall and averaging 1/2"/year diameter increment, while producing nuts from about 2005 on. Unfortunately, it showed signs of blight in 2012, and by 2016 everything above 20' was dead. The lower portion now looks like a bottle brush, with abundant epicormic sprouts, but I expect the disease to continue downward to ground level. The 16" diameter older tree used for controlled pollination during the 20-oughts has also died back to ground level.

Also the state's highest point, not surprisingly. On a visit there 10-12 years back, I noted a hardwood forest more typical of NNJ, or even CT - altitude/latitude mix. I'm still not impressed with that "record" for Maine. Given the dozens of -40 or colder readings, it would be surprising if not a single one had even the 5 mph breeze that would kick WCI colder than -52. Van Buren, former holder of the state record at -48 (in 1925 - almost certainly no wind data), has had mornings -44 to -47 on 4 days 1984 onward - 1/22/84 -47; 1/11/95 -47; 1/16/09 -44; 1/26/09 -45. Fort Kent had -42 on 1/14/57 (maybe no wind data, either) and -30 on CAR's -52 morning. Clayton Lake, 70 miles WSW from CAR, dropped to -31 on 1/18/82 and probably was just as windy as CAR.

Mid 30s here.

I'm guessing that those 3.5 billion OH as trees include saplings and perhaps seedlings, while the 3.5 billion chestnuts were larger trees. I've read that one in four trees in the eastern hardwood forest was a chestnut, and given the way trees/forests were measured 100+ years ago, those were all tall overstory trees. However, the "not just species, but genus" points to another huge impact on forests. Other species will fill in the gaps, as oaks (mostly) did after chestnut blight, but the forest will not be the same. EAB has been detected in Maine, not adjacent to its establishment in NH but in Madawaska. The bug had been found across the St. John in Edmundston, NB a year or two before, probably transported from farther west in firewood or pallets. That far north the native woods have just brown ash, found mainly in swampy ground and not at all abundant, which might limit the rate of advance.

Most America chestnuts have either male or female flowers, not both, so at least half a dozen should be planted. And those burrs/spikes are long and lethal; leather gloves are highly recommended for handling. The spikes do soften as the hulls get ready to open, but the local squirrels usually have that softening timed to the minute.

There were 4 in the party, and one was lost in a crevasse at relatively low elevation prior to the windstorm. The others continued, and all 3 survived. I can't remember if they retained all fingers and toes. (I read the book during the mid 1970s.)

For years there have been oyster-farm rafts just downstream of the Damariscotta River Association's dock/float on the Dodge Point state land, on the Newcastle side. Would you know if you're working near there?