New Hampshire Green Leaves Blog

Chilly weather is biting this month, though nowhere near as hard. The lowest nighttime temperatures I’ve seen this month have been just 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a far cry from my childhood when 20 to 25 below zero F and even 30 below would occasionally accompany a real cold snap. The picture below dates from at least 10 years ago.

I only took a picture because such low temps seem to be a thing of the past (hope I’m not jinxing myself). This is one aspect of global warming I won’t complain about.

Snow has been sparse this winter. On January 19, there was about two inches or snow on the ground instead of the usual 6 to 8 inches. Additional flurries have left a dusting, maybe one time we got about three and half inches. This was dry snow, so dry that my brother was able to use a leaf blower to clear his driveway.

This is worrisome as it likely means a dry spring with the risk of brush fires. While New Hampshire is usually immune to the vast wildfires which plague the far West, smaller brush fires are not uncommon in the spring. The largest forest fire to hit New Hampshire was in April of 1941, the result of some unusually hot weather coupled with a huge amount of tinder left over from the Great Hurricane of 1938. WMUR, the state TV station, had a local color story giving an account of the event.
Only time will tell if we get any major fires this spring and summer.

Animals are stirring about. I have a plastic composter in the backyard where I collect leaves, spent flowers and weeds I yank up. Food waste also goes into it, but only after sitting in a compost bucket in the breezeway where it gets skanky enough so wild animals will turn their noses up at it. Even so, they still check the backyard composter once in a while. About a week ago, I noticed the lid was off. On checking I found a generous number of raccoon tracks around the composter. The material inside is still frozen solid, so I don’t think they found much that was palatable. I’m glad it was just raccoons rather than a bear, as bears can trash a plastic compost bin without too much trouble. That was the sad fate of one that I had many years ago, which is why I have the food waste in a ‘half-way’ house before I finally consign it to the composter. I figure even bears have their limits.

While it’s still mid-winter, I saw something this past week which is usually a sign of spring. A flock of robins came through, feeding on the neighbor’s lawn and visiting my hawthorn trees which still have berries on them. It was startling to see them and left me wondering if this meant an early spring. Previous to this, the earliest I had seen a robin was late February.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have begun baking bread again. Since it’s been so long, a learning curve needs to be renegotiated. So far, my loaves seem to want to deflate in the oven. I’ve gotten new yeast so the problem is likely over-kneading or possibly over-proofing. I do tend to be a little vigorous with kneading so will have to lighten up. The resulting loaves are still perfectly good for eating but not quite what I’m striving for.

One use for less than perfect loaves is to use them to make stuffing mix. A YouTube video by someone styling himself Wyyse Guy had a recipe that looked good. I made a few adjustments, leaving out the carrots and egg. There’s no need to wait for the bread go stale, you can just dry it out in the oven. As it was always my mother’s custom to add giblet meat to her stuffing mix (she used Bells Stuffing Mix for her breading), I saw a chance to use up the chicken livers I had bought at the local farmers’ market over the summer. After cooking and grinding up a few, I added them to the mix I had, along with the cooking water. Baking it all in a casserole dish produced some very pleasing results.

Well, that’s all for now. Have a good February.