Late fall almost always arrives by the second week in November, and it lasts through early December. It's a transition season during which frost and morning fogs become more frequent, the last leaves fall, skies become darker, wind speed increases and the cold puts an end to the year's flower and vegetable cycles.
The longest nights of the year now begin.
Overwintering geese gather at inland waterways and the annual flyovers of sand hill cranes begin across the fields and hillsides.
Grazing season draws to a close as pasture growth slows in the cold of the waxing moon, the season of winter clouds arrives from the west as the average percentage of cloud cover doubles over summer and middle autumn's averages along the highways.
Ironweed seeds are soft and white when late fall comes. Golden rod and the thimbleweed are tufted like cotton, their foliage a deep chocolate brown. The milkweed pods have opened scarlet rose hips and the buds of pussywillows stand out now. Mock orange honeysuckles and forsythias are thinning, and their leaf fall measures the progress of the last phase of autumn. Beech trees, honeysuckles, box wood, forsythia and the strongest of the maples, Osage orange and sycamores keep scattered color to the landscape past Thanksgiving. But when early winter arrives, at the end of December's first week, it takes almost all the whole house.
Bill Felcker will be back again next week with notes for the third week of late fall. In the meantime, make a few notes about what you see. Compare those notes with what you see next year and the next.
