The Daily: 24 February 2025

If Matthew finds ice, he breaks it.                                                      When the cat lies in sunshine in February
If he doesn’t break it, he makes it all the harder.                              she'll creep behind the stove in March.

If there is sharp frost on Matthew’s Day, it will last till March.

The fox is hesitant to walk on ice after St Matthias has passed.

Matthias breaks winter’s back.

Sap begins to run on St Matthew’s Day.

February 24th is St Matthew’s day. This Matthew is not the writer of the first chapter of the New Testament but rather Matthias, the replacement for Judas after the unfortunate incident in the garden. In the Church upheaval of the late 1960s, the official feast day for the apostle Matthias was moved to May 14th, so as not to fall in Lent. However, Matthew’s day is older than the church calendar and is rooted not in hazy hagiography but the actual living world in the north of Europe.

St Matthew’s day is an old weather marker, carried over from East Anglia with the New England colonists. The end of February is the end of the year in traditional European calendars. March 1st brings in the new year and the new spring, which for much of the world is the same thing. So there is a certain amount of predicting the given in February’s weather markers — from Candlemas asserting that we have six more weeks of winter weather to birds bring the sun from the south on Valentine’s Day to Matthew breaking winter’s back. On average, these predictions will be correct because our calendars are fairly good at keeping time with the seasonal cycle and because weather follows patterns… mostly… and the main driver of spring warmth, increasing day length, is constant from year to year. On St Matthew’s day, in this part of the world, there are eleven hours of sunlight to beat down on the ice.

What I find interesting is that these predictions for the north of Europe generally work in New England. Weather folklore reveals just how close New England is to Old England. Though it’s an ocean away and quite a bit south of the White Cliffs of Dover, the timing of weather is very similar. However, we experience more extremes on the west side of the Atlantic; it is much colder and snowier here and the swing from winter to summer is more drastic. Still, it is generally true that the end of February is the end of the worst of winter. As the old saws quoted above declare, though there may still be ice, it’s unwise to trust its strength as we head into March.

The timing of weather is changing these days. Spring weather seems to be creeping further and further back into winter, though the transformation is not that spring is coming earlier as much as summer is lasting later. The days may still see the same dwindling sunlight hours heading into winter, but there is so much heat in summer now it takes months to shed it. Around here, as long as the polar vortex remains strong and keeps all the arctic air confined at the top of the world, it’s not unusual to spend the winter holidays in shirt sleeves. But the trees are all bare, because they are counting the daylight hours and ignoring the weather.

In any case, winter is not getting as cold as it once did on average, and it takes much less time and energy to reheat the hemisphere back to balmy summer. This is one of the main problems with climate change. Many woody plants and some perennials count hours of sunlight (or hours of darkness) and are on the same old, pre-climate-change calendar. But their mobile partners in pollination — bugs and birds and the weather itself in the form of wind — are following new schedules. There is an asynchrony in the dance of life. Some migratory birds show up weeks before their food sources are breaking dormancy. Insects that spent winter bedded down locally may wake in a string of warm January days, long before there are blossoms. But then winter cold will settle back in, killing the hungry and exposed bugs. Some plants also take cues from the weather and not from the time. Like the insects, the buds and shoots that are drawn out by unseasonable warmth are blighted when more typical weather returns.

There isn’t much to be done about any of this, though putting out bird food — especially the high calorie meal worms that best match normal spring fare — is a good idea. But I think part of being aware of the climate changes we’ve created is bearing witness. Keep records. Learn the new patterns — if there are any. Because the challenge we will be facing for decades to come is a seeming lack of pattern, and we humans don’t do well in random time. So watch for the changes and hang them on the old patterns. Because there will still be eleven hours of daylight on St Matthew’s Day where I live. There will be that underlying continuity even in the chaos.

Our ancestors noted the patterns and made calendars and weather lore so that we would not feel adrift in time, so that we could be embedded in our places, so that we could go about our lives, relying on the steady recurrence of planting season and harvest and snow in deep winter. Their calendars still mostly work. Sap will begin running soon, though this year it hasn’t already darkened the bark of maple trees, for a nice change. But in this time of change, someone has to carry out recalibration. This tuning up the calendars is the work of those who pay attention to this Earth.

What does St Matthew bring to your part of the world? Notice the details of the day where you live. Write it down. Compare it to the old calendars… and then draw up new ones if need be. Someday someone will appreciate what reliable continuity you’ve managed to cull from the flux.

Matthias is associated with the axe. There are stories of his martyrdom that include beheading, though that is not an essential element of his story. The axe does not appear in much iconography from the more benign climates of Greek Orthodoxy. He more often carries a scroll down south. It’s the northern images that include that ice breaker.

The axe he carries is clearly a battle axe, with a long thin blade that would never stand up to woodcutting though it might, indeed, be a fairly effective ice breaker. Still, the axe puts me in mind of the one northern garden task that nearly always falls in the ten to eleven hours days of February — pruning.

This is the time of year to cut out dead wood, thin congestion in orchard trees, and remove all the canes and briar vines that are older than two growing seasons. Of course, none of this happens with an axe, battle or otherwise, though a sharp hatchet may help with knotty wood. What you want is a very good selection of pruners and loppers. Buy the highest quality you can afford. I use Felco because the handles are solid, the blades stay sharp and are easily honed, and if you mess them up — usually through cutting things that don’t cut like gritty soil or nails embedded in wood — the blades are replaceable, at a tenth of the cost of a whole new tool.

Here’s a neat trick for sharpening those beveled blades that I found in Henry Homeyer‘s book, Organic Gardening [Not Just] in the Northeast. Use a marker to blacken the bevel. Then hone evenly, being sure to remove the ink from the entire surface at once. This helps preserve the angle while you are grinding off the dull surface. Honing is a project to tackle in the deepest winter, when the days are short and all you want is an excuse to sit quietly by the fire. I have found that it’s a great way to meditate. But that should probably be done by now, or at least before you need to tackle the trees and vines. If you don’t have the time or don’t want to risk damaging your $70 pruners with your inexperience, I am quite sure there is a local hardware store near you that will do the job for a small fee. Probably less than the cost of a new set of blades.

I know pruning is a daunting task, not least because the orchard might be buried under four feet of snow. (This is the reason we have snowshoes… well, that and tapping maple trees…) You might also think that the trees don’t need your interference. They are growing as they think they ought to grow and don’t want you cutting off their branches. And you would be right about that. However, if you want to get fruit out of your trees, then the trees might need some persuading.

Fruit trees of nearly all kinds produce fruit on tiny branchlets that stick out from the main branch, usually inside the leaf canopy. This is to protect the fruit from weather and birds, but also the keep the developing fruit out of the way of photosynthesis. Both you and the tree want to maximize photosynthesis. But the tree’s goal is to make a little fruit most years and lots of leaves. If you want to maximize both the leaves and the fruits, then it’s a good idea to create space in the interior of the tree. Also, because the tree will send branches shooting up wherever, you might find that branches are touching. This might be desirable in willow fencing where the branches will eventually grow into each other, creating a solid barrier, but it usually leads to problems in fruit trees. The branches will rub against each other, grinding off bark and opening up the living wood to infection. At best, you and the tree are going to end up with a knot of useless wood where nothing grows, neither leaf nor fruit.

So you can see your goals here.

If you don’t want an abundance of fruit — which is just fine for most of us — then you can mostly leave the tree alone. Cut out what might lead to damaged wood later. Perhaps thin out some of the water sprouts, those thin smooth branches that grow straight up toward the sun where the tree uses them to bulk up sun-gathering leaf surface area. But don’t remove all of those, especially in places with warm summers, because those sprouts help cool the tree through respiration and shade. And of course, the leaves at the top are photosynthesizing without much cluttering up the tree’s interior space. However, if you are an orchardist, then you want to maximize fruit production. You will want to thin the interior of the tree almost completely. This means cutting out the little fruiting branches from last year, keeping all branches well-separated, and removing all the non-fruiting sprouts and root suckers.

I tend to fall in between the casual minimalism of permaculture and the maximal control of running a profitable orchard. I cut all suckers, because those just get in my way, invariably finding my exposed toes as I am shuffling through the garden. Also, I’m not sure what benefit those ever confer to a tree. They are growing wood, with all the attendant expense of that project, but as they are always under the tree there isn’t much capacity for photosynthesis. I think these are signs of stress. The tree seems to be deeply confused. This doesn’t happen here in New England nearly as much as it did in New Mexico, so perhaps it is related to drought. I also cut most of the water sprouts because these are often growing straight up and therefore crossing many other branches (which tend to grow more at an angle to allow for a rounded canopy). But the sprouts that form in the middle of the tree, where most of the branches are also growing straight up, can stay.

I do cut off many of last year’s fruit spurs, but I’m not religious about that. Some can be left to make new branches. Many will just fall off eventually. In fact, waiting until the end of winter to prune usually means that the wind and weather have thinned out all the little things the tree is no longer using. This includes dead wood. And that is one category of pruning I am religious about in a fruit tree. Anything that is blackened, that has holes in its bark, that is twisted and desiccated, it all goes. That is doing nothing good for you or the tree. It is probably not doing good for other animals either, though maybe bees and wasps might be living in the cavities. Still, there are better ways to accommodate bees — big trees that are not fruit producers are probably preferable for housing anyway. I have several stumps and snags in the jungle south of my garage that I will never remove. They are riddled with woodpecker and insect holes. The critters can live there, not in the fruit trees.

Thinning out the brambles is another thing that inspires zealotry in me. First, I only barely tolerate these spiny things in my life to begin with. They cover large swathes of space with uncomfortable prickles, and yet even the most productive of them produce not much more than a few quarts of fruit that really doesn’t keep that well. And only on the second year wood. A bramble patch left to its own devices will colonize acres and eventually cease to produce anything but a handful of berries, usually far out of reach for anyone that can’t fly and perch on the thin and thorny branches. I don’t want a quarter acre of thorns, so I cut them back viciously, sometimes not even sparing the year-old canes that will fruit in the coming summer. I would almost prefer to cut the whole patch down every other year after fruiting. But then I can’t have blackberries every other year.

So in the autumn, I will begin marking the canes that have fruited. Sometimes this is as simple as leaving a few fruits on the vine. But these thin fruit spurs can get knocked off by winter, so I also use string. Thick, pale jute or yarn tied at the base of the fruited vine works best. I can see it in the spring, but it’s not jarring all winter. In mild Decembers I sometimes do the pruning without ever marking anything. But December is cold and busy and who wants to be schlepping blackberry canes around in the dark anyway… So most years I will do the cutting when I am doing the fruit tree pruning, tossing the whole pile into the ravine behind my garage.

I do keep some prunings. Supple and straight water sprouts are perfect trellis material. Applewood of any thickness makes good firewood and is especially good in a wood-fired grill. When I am feeling ambitious, I cut brambles into mulch. The thin wood breaks down fast, but while it is still nominally whole it is spiny enough to deter digging. I use rose canes — which are blackberry cousins — in the same fashion. Kept the family terrier out of the perennial beds in New Mexico. This year, I plan on spreading the thorns on the exposed mound in the veg garden. We’ll see if that can protect the sunflower seedlings from the rodents. (I’m not holding my breath on that one…)

One final pruning project of the year is to cut back the grapes. I don’t have many grapes here in New England. I am not fond of the insipid Concord grapes, and not much else tolerates cold winters. But as things warm up, I will be planting more vines. I had many in New Mexico. A few were more decorative, grown as screens that also provided me with edible grape leaves, and those I left to their rambling. But the ones with tasty fruit — fruit which only grows on new wood — were cut back to the trunk every year. This happened in late February in New Mexico, after the worst of winter was over and before the desiccating winds of spring. I suspect pruning grape vines will always be more of a March task in New England. You don’t want to cut too soon because pruning stimulates sprouting and young sprouts are sensitive to frost. Moreover, it’s my experience that once that scaly, pellicle-coated bud has broken, nothing else will grow from that part of the vine. So frost-killed sprouts mean frost-killed branches.

I’m not pruning yet even though the days are definitely running long enough now. I don’t want to put it off too much more or I will risk opening holes in the wood and not leaving sufficient cold time to heal the cut. This is why pruning happens in winter, after all, to make holes in bark without risking infection from microbes and insects. But there are, indeed, four foot piles of snow in my garden now, and I don’t have snow shoes at the moment. I am thinking seriously of buying a pair though. Still, I imagine pruning on deep snow would lead to injury one way or another. So I am holding off for another couple weekends. There are rumors of temperatures above freezing in the coming week. I don’t know if I believe those rumors, but at the worst, maybe we won’t get a fresh layer added to the pile. (We have snow stratigraphy this winter…)

For the moment, I am making notes on all the things that need doing as soon as all this snow stops falling. I have sorted the seeds into the accordion folder that is organized by rough planting date. I have started a few pepper seeds and will soon be planting the seeds of ornamental flowers that will grow in pots on my porch and around the garden. I have made at least a dozen veg garden planting maps and have nearly settled on one — not least because I have finally bought the seed and ordered starter plants, which is a hard stop on daydreaming.

There may be four feet of snow between me and the gardening season, but spring is coming on fast. This Friday the Sap Moon is new. Next week is March. Matthias has his axe ready to fall… And I can trust that the ice will be breaking soon.

Meanwhile, this is keeping me warm…

©Elizabeth Anker 2025