The Daily: 15 July 2023

St Swithin’s Day

I’ve heard it said that great strawberries hardly ever happen in Vermont. I even know a guy who used to drive to the north border to get Quebec berries, when that sort of thing was still possible. He claimed that Canadian berries are superior most years. The difference is in the weather. 

In normal years (whatever that means now), Vermont is cool and damp through April, May, and most of June. Most importantly for berries, Vermont is under cloud-cover. The berries don’t get enough sun to develop their sugars. Vermont berries usually taste quite acidic, tart, just like I like them. But this year has been strange. A very cold April set blooming back until late May, which was so dry that berries barely set before the middle of June, which was not so much cloudy as smokey. So the fruit set but it didn’t mature. No sugars, but also no tart flavors either. And none of these berries are very large, despite a June of average moisture. So we still have green berries in the middle of July, at the tail end of the Strawberry Moon. And the weather now, in this crucial period when we need sun for sugar development in these berries?… is rather apocalyptically wet.

Now, I don’t pretend to know what combination of all this strange weather caused it, but there is a definite note of strawberry bitterness. Not just in my berries, but also in the ones that I bought at the farmer’s market. I don’t even feel like going to the minimal effort of freezing them, though they might make an interestingly complex syrup with a good deal of sugar as counterbalance.

On the other hand, as we all know from the smoke, Canada has been dry for a while. So if the farmers up there have managed to keep their plants hydrated enough to get any fruit at all, the berries are probably super sweet. I suspect there are contraband berries coming across the border, though I probably wouldn’t like them much better. I don’t like sweet. I like the ‘normal’ cloudy Vermont berries. But we seem to have misplaced normal.

All this weird weather got me to thinking about St Swithin’s Day, which is today. It’s an old weather marking day. It is referenced by Chaucer, and he called it the lore of old folks. The Ides of July may actually be one of the oldest weather marking days in this culture because this is when grain farmers in the temperate northern climates start to get nervous about the harvest. As with hay-making, the grain harvest needs to have dry weather for many consecutive days. Not necessarily forty days, but enough for the work gangs to go around the manor fields and bring it all into the threshing floor. 

Swithin was a 9th century Anglo Saxon bishop of Winchester, though almost nothing written about him dates from prior to the 11th century. So he may be a bit of a fiction. In a bit of irony, St Swithin is who one calls upon when there is drought, though a happy prediction on his day is for dry weather — not more rain. Forty days is a long dry spell in the British Isles, but historically there has been a scientific basis to the weather duration, whether wet or dry.

Around this time, the jet stream settles into a pattern which remains somewhat constant until the beginning of September when the days shorten enough to allow more cooling and therefore more fluctuation — autumn weather. When this steady jet stream flows north of the British Isles, then continental high pressure creates the dry weather English farmers need for the grain harvest. But when the jet stream settles into a more southerly flow, then Arctic and Atlantic weather moves in — with rain for forty days and forty nights. (Incidentally, now you know why the King James translation of Genesis has a forty-day flood when it’s an unspecified duration in the original.) So in normal years, St Swithin’s Day is indeed the beginning of a long period of the same weather, day in and day out. Because of the Atlantic currents — oceanic and air flow — the jet stream is more often to the north, making grain farmers very happy.

Things are changing though. I wonder how long St Swithin’s day will be a weather predictor. I suspect that if the jet stream settles at all, it will happen earlier in the year because it doesn’t take as long to heat the Northern Hemisphere. We get sunny drought in May now and Canadian fire in June. But the heating is also affecting the North Atlantic currents. The jet stream is affected by oceanic air flow patterns, of course, and these currents are shifting. It is likely that the jet stream will not often land north of the British Isles; the trade winds may not even get there in years to come. So if there is a settling, it may be wet Arctic and Atlantic air. Not great for English farmers. Probably not great for New England farmers either.

Today, St Swithin is saying there will be sun for the next forty days. I hope he’s right. It might take that long to thoroughly dry out Vermont. As wet as it has been, it may be time to sow winter wheat before the hay mowing is done. But, rain or shine, the strawberries might be a lost cause. I wonder what happens to blueberries after a summer of biblical flooding followed by forty days of hot…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023