Bill Felker

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack for the Second Week Of Middle Spring

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack for the First Week Of Middle Spring.

All kinds of things happen in the benign month-long time of middle spring. And one thing always leads to another.

When nettles are six inches tall, then middle spring wildflowers are opening all over the woods.

When the American toad gives its shrill mating call, that will be the time to plant corn.

Morel mushrooms appear when May apples push out from the ground, when cowslip buds in the swamp, and when leaves come out on skunk cabbage.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the Transition Time to Middle Spring.

I have been bringing together all my almanac notes for the past thirty years. And I try to separate myself from my observations, but that is becoming more difficult. It is becoming clearer to me that these notes are autobiographical, even though they seem to have little to do with me and everything to do with the trivia of what is happening at certain times throughout the small world in which I live.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the fifth week of Early Spring.

White cabbage butterflies are the surest sign of the beginning of the end of early spring. And once you notice the familiar white cabbage butterfly, then you know the more elusive mourning cloak butterflies and the question mark butterflies and the tortoise shell butterflies and the tiny blues are flying too.

When you see cabbage butterflies, then you know that gold finches are turning gold, and soon you may soon see ants working on the sidewalk.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the fourth week of Early Spring. 

When lilac and mock orange buds are glowing defiantly against the gray sky, Virginia bluebells always push out from their hillsides. Raspberry and rose bushes are developing fresh leaves. Wild onions are getting lanky. Everything is growing back: Jacob's ladder, ragwort, spring beauties, wood mint, ground ivy, catchweed, moneywort, waterleaf, sweet rockets, leafcup, hemlock, parsnip and garlic mustard. Skunk cabbage is red, fat, and blooming in the swamp flats.