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Hi,
You may have heard about the winter forecast put out by Accuweather last week. It calls for a rather severe winter for the Great Lakes area. They especially have pinpointed the Chicago area for the worst of the severe winter. This area, of course, includes Newaygo County. The problem with the forecast, in my judgment anyway, is it is really is just a guess. The accuracy of this forecast has to be only 33% because if you divide up the winter forecast into colder than normal, near normal or above normal you have roughly a 33% accuracy rate if you threw darts and selected one of the three possible forecasts. I will be issuing my own winter forecast in roughly a month. Some years one can make a decent forecast this early in the season, but not this year. It is truly a crapshoot and while Accuweather's forecast might prove right, I only give it a 33% chance of being accurate. This brings up an old story that I believe I mentioned in this column in years past. As the story goes it seems that a journalist planned on doing a story on the coming winter and asked an old Indian Chief about what he thought about the coming winter. The old Injun said, "Heap bad winter! Snow as high as teepees! Squaws will cross big river with snowshoes!" The journalist asked the Chief, "How do you know this? Are the Wooly caterpillars black and have lots of hair?" The Chief replied, "No! White men have huge woodpiles!"
Accuweather's forecast for the winter is based primarily on thinking that the very weak La Nina (below average water temperature in the Pacific near the equator) will strengthen over the winter. The problem I see with this forecast is only half of the many computer models are calling for this. On top of this, the last two weeks looks like there hasn't been any change in the relative water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which sort of indicates there may not be any strengthening-perhaps a further weakening and possibly even turning into an El Nino! Of course, I should know this in a month so I will use this info to make my forecast.
While we are about done harvesting and selling our pawpaw crop, there still are some to pick. After we are done selling pawpaw fruit, probably the later part of the week, we will be selling packets of pawpaw seeds along with instructions on how to grow your own pawpaw trees.
This week we will be starting to pick our Red and Golden Delicious, Idared, Golden Russet, Roxbury Russet, Northern Spy and Roman Beauty apples.
See the last newsletter for the other apples we presently have at our market.
On Friday we harvested our 271.2 pound pumpkin. We have this pumpkin in the stand in front of a picnic table. This pumpkin is really nice looking with a typical orange pumpkin color. We have a nice giant pumpkin crop this year and have already sold roughly 25 of them-most were from 80 to 140 pounds each. We have two huge pumpkins out in the field that may exceed 200 pounds but we are sure the biggest pumpkin we grew this year is that 271.2 pound beauty.
Annemarie saw on the internet a photo of a farm market with several types of winter squash up for sale. She called my attention to the sign next to the squash which read "$1.00 a pound." At this price a bushel of squash would be over 50 dollars. We are selling good quality winter squash for $10 a bushel! We have good quantities of acorn, butternut, buttercup and spaghetti squash. Feel free to mix and match. Squash is loaded with vitamins and minerals and is an excellent source of fiber. We are giving away a sheet of instructions on how to freeze winter squash. We also have an instruction sheet on using our sugar (pie) pumpkins to make pumpkin pie-which is much tastier than the canned pumpkin in the store. By the way, we still are picking green and yellow beans that are quite tender and tasty. We probably will be picking the beans all week although we should have the best quantity early in the week. We also have good quantities of freshly dug sweet potatoes and will have large quantities late in the week of freshly dug red and Kennebec potatoes as well as carrots. By the way, even though its now mid-October we do have small quantities of both tomatoes and peppers-we didn't have a killing frost yet!
Nashle,
Tom
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