No matter the weather, April almost always means middle spring right around the corner, and, especially if the early spring has been cold, it could be a good time to count the weeks until summer.
- In average years, only one week remains until the yellow flowers of forsythia bloom
- Two weeks until all the honeysuckles and lilacs flower
- Three weeks until May apples push out from the ground, a sign that morels are swelling in the nights
- Four weeks to to the first cricket song of late spring and the emerging of preying mantises from their egg sacks, or “oothecas” as they are called
- Five weeks to the great warbler migration through the Lower Midwest, the time when clovers flower in the pasture andin your lawn and the high canopy of trees starts to fill with green leaves.
- Six weeks to the first strawberry pie
- Seven weeks until the first orange daylilies blossom
- Eight weeks until roses flower and almost all the leaves have emerged on the trees.
- Nine weeks until the first mulberries are sweet for picking and cottonwood cotton drifts in the wind.
- Ten weeks until wild black raspberries sweeten and fledgling robins peep in the bushes.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the first week of Middle Spring and the first full week of the Cows Switching their Tails Moon. In the meantime every space and year has its own timetable, but the more you count, the more you see.
