Once in a Blue Snow

Today Rochester Minnesota and surrounding area experience a weather event that statistically only happens once every 1000 years.

We got 15 inches of snow on May 2.

This is 4 times more snow than we have had in "all" the recorded dates in May going back to 1886. This is 4 times more than every snow fall in the whole month of May for the last 127 years of recorded history. It could be more snow than we have had since the last ice age. Move over global warming a new crisis is upon us.

This spring does kinda feel like an ice age. We have had snow every weekend in April and now the first week in May. The corn and bean farmers haven't turned a wheel and the soil temps are hovering in the mid 30's.

The kids were off of school yesterday, but it wasn't much fun since we were out of electricity the whole day. Trees were down everywhere and it took all day for crews to get power restored. We are only two miles down the road from the electric coop offices so I thought that would work in our favor, but not so much.

Even the Internet, that great artery of the life blood of social media, was frozen due to the power being down. So everyone was reading books and trying to keep warm. How '80's, as in 1880's.

When I was pushing snow in the morning with the 4 wheeler before I went to work (we only had 8-10 inches then), I noticed that the snow was very very blue colored. The local meteorologist said that was because it was so wet and heavy. He said there is the equivalent of two inches of rainfall locked in the matrix. If this melts gradually and soaks in, this will go a long way to restoring some much need subsoil moisture. So even a record blue snow has a silver lining.

Needless to say, I'm a little behind on our little corner of agricultural Eden. Probably good I delayed planting our tomato and pepper transplants a couple of weeks. We already have some six inch tall plants that need to be potted to bigger pots (Friday's project). Last year we were harvesting greens several weeks ago. This year they are barely up.

I am convinced that when the weather man says the average temperature is such and such for the day. They get that number from averaging all the extremes together. Average weather seems like a mythological thing like unicorns and blue snow.

Rochester's outdoor farmers market starts Saturday. That will be fun.

Got to go rototill some snow!

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