Becky Nelson
Bramblings
It’s Groundhog Day. I know it’s not, but in the true spirit of the movie day, we’re doing a repeat of the day. Groundhog Day was actually yesterday, and the Pennsylvanian groundhog, Punxsutawny Phil, didn’t see his shadow, foretelling an early spring. I don’t think many take this prediction with any seriousness as the predictions are accurate about half the time, but it gives hope that winter might end sometime.
Groundhog Day was a German tradition brought from the old country with a wave of immigrants who celebrated a couple of pagan pre-spring rituals at Candlemas on February 2 between the winter solstice and the spring equinox according to History.com. Sources disagree about whether the predictor was a groundhog or a hedgehog. If it weren’t for an enterprising newspaper editor, we never would have heard of Punxsutawny Phil here in the Northeast, but way back in 1887, Clymer Freas started the tradition in the sleepy town of Punxatawny, Pennsylvania by creating a buzz with local town businessmen and the tradition stuck.
Here in our community, we won’t see a woodchuck until real spring when the grass starts growing and they come out of their dens. That’s just fine with me, as we try to keep the clever rodents out of our new crops. They eat. And eat and eat and eat, and love things we love, like beans and cukes and all manner of vegetables. We have had a war on woodchucks here at the farm for as long as I can remember, and work to keep them from setting up their dens near the gardens.
My grandmother used to have a dog, Sam, a collie cross, who would sit at the edge of a woodchuck hole in a field or a stonewall for hours, waiting for the rodent to pop its head out to take a look around. He would quickly dispatch the pest and disrupt the prolific breeding cycle of the local resident for a while. We owned a similar pup, Suzie Q, who would do the same. I have a pesty resident now who has burrowed under the screen porch. I saw him or her several times last summer in the grass on the lawn and am hoping it is not part of a family that has taken up permanent residence.
Some sources say that the German tradition was actually watching for hedgehogs, a very different rodent that we know as a porcupine around here. We have plenty of porcupines around here in the woodlots and often see signs of them at the base of hollow trees where they take up residence. They sometimes live in the rocks and small caves in the ledges in the hills around the farm and create some havoc in trees that are their favorite foods like hemlock in the winter. Porcupines eat most anything that grows, and will chew on wood and furniture in uninhabited hunting camps if they can find their way inside.
No matter the Groundhog Day rodent, spring is coming. Here at the farm we are also chewing up wood, getting the sugarwood split and stacked for the coming maple season. The weather has been unusual this year, and some producers have already made syrup, tapping much earlier than traditionally. We have not begun tapping, hoping to get more preparations and equipment repairs done before we enter the woods. Next week we will begin repairing any downed maple lines in the sugar orchard, and will follow with a tapping crew probably the week after. The sugar season is very different than it was a couple decades ago, and we are trying to catch up to the changing weather patterns as the climate around here starts to change in a more regular pattern with earlier sap runs.
As the day repeats in the movie Groundhog Day, our days will begin to repeat as we start the sugaring process. It is an intense and busy time of year, often interrupted by periods of downright wintery weather with peeks of the promise of spring in the air on other days. Unlike the movie, there is hope for getting out of the rut of late winter. We see Groundhog Day as a day of hope.
— Becky Nelson and her husband own Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, family owned since 1780. She can be reached at [email protected].
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