Milk Maid

Are you even a Minnesotan if you don’t like to talk about weather? The weather effects our lives daily and we as Minnesotans are proud that we survive anything that the weather throws at us.

I saw this amusing photo floating around on the internet this week of a weatherman in Florida telling people how to deal with 53 degrees.

On his newscast he said, “Dress in layers! Limit your time outdoors!”

How good does 53 degrees sound right now? I’d take it!

Because we are Minnesotans and natural amateur weather forecasters, many people have their own ways of predicting the weather.

One of Cherri and I’s favorite Mascot readers has enlightened us with some of her weather predicting hacks. The first is to use a “weather stick”. People have used them for centuries to predict the weather.

It’s believed that the Abenaki Indians that lived along the northeastern coast of the United States and Canada were the first to use them. Weather sticks are made from the dried twigs of balsam fir trees and they’re usually between 15 and 16 inches long.

Looking at them, you’ll see they’re incredibly simple – just a stick with the bark removed and a little piece of the tree’s trunk remaining so that you can easily nail it to a wall, or fence post, etc.

The weather prediction is all in the way weather stick moves. The stick curls upwards sharply when good weather is headed your way and downwards when the weather is about to take a turn for the worse.

They’re very accurate, and they last a long time. These sticks bend based on the relative humidity. The higher the humidity, which often signifies bad weather, makes them curl downward. When they dry out, they straighten out or curve upwards. You can’t simply cut a twig from any tree and expect it to predict the weather.

Live balsam fir trees develop reaction wood on the undersides of their branches so that in dry weather, their reaction wood fibers shrink to conserve water, thus bending them towards the ground. Then, when rains come along and the fir trees start drawing more water, those same fibers expand and the tree’s branches unfurl.

Believe it or not, there are even videos on the internet that show you how the sticks react to the weather. Our favorite reader brought us in a catalog that sells weather sticks.

They are made from balsam fir and come in a two pack! What a deal! Before Christmas, she was telling me to pay attention to the last six days of the year and the first six days of the new year. This is an old Amish method of weather predicting.

December 26 represents January, December 27 represents February and so on. It’s believed that the weather on those days will predict what the corresponding month will bring like precipitation, wind, temperatures and so on.

Another common “weatherlore” is for every fog in August, there will be a measurable snowfall in winter. If I knew that, I would have kept track in August.

I would be neat to see if there is any truth to it. A weatherlore that I believe is about flies in the summer. If flies really start to bite, and I mean really bite, in the summer, that means rain is on the way.

Even though I won’t be ditching any of my weather apps soon, it is kind of neat to look into old weatherlores to see if how accurate or they are.