by Jeannie Travis
Has your family got tried and true means of predicting the winter weather? One thing I remember is when you saw an old sow running back and forth with big mouthfuls of grass you knew it was going to turn off almighty cold…Cause that sow was making herself a good snug bed. All matters of ways are used to predict how cold the winter will be. The persimmon seed is only one of the ways oldsters used to predict the coming winters weather. You carefully and laboriously pry open a persimmon seed, taking care not to mess up the little shape inside. If it is a spoon shape you will have lots of bad weather and have to eat a lot of thin soup. It’s a fork this year, by the way, so we’ll have plenty of meat and stuff to eat. BUT, the birds and squirrels are fast depleting the supply of seeds, etc.
Usually the ribbon grass out front makes pretty plumes before the birds swoop in and ruin them. This year they ate the seeds and ruined the ‘plumes’ before they ever fluffed out. The big dog wood tree out back has NO seed left. Persimmon seed as a weather predictor? Don’t tell the little ones but that shape is just the new leaf ready to unfurl if the seed gets lucky and gets planted. If you feed persimmons to goats they will chomp up seeds and all,didja know that?
Other ways of predicting the weather? If squirrels have really, really bushy tails it means cold weather – if there are lots of wild fruits and nuts it will be a cold winter – if the squirrels build extra thick nests, again, cold winter. If the woolly worms have mostly black…Cold winter…If the black part in front of the brown band is wide, the ‘head’ of the winter will be cold…..Narrow brown band in the black…very cold winter….If tame rabbits grow unusually thick fur…cold winter….If corn has unusually thick shucks well out over the ends of the cob…cold winter….Seems like there is one that mentions whether hornets build their nests low to the ground or high in a tree …. And some butterfly/moth larvae build their cocoons high or low depending on how cold the winter is going to be…Snow line, I suppose….I saw that one on TV , so it must be true !*grin*
There is some sort of rule about counting the fogs in August to predict how many snows we’ll have the next winter…I never think of counting those fogs till I read an article about predicting the winter weather and by the time anyone gets interested in that August is long gone !