Peter Hendra wrote in
:

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.

NZ sounds like South Carolina. We rarely get any snow at all and only
once or twice in a lifetime is there snow to close the place down. In
1973, the last snow storm in SC, the state was shut down for nearly a
week! Some trees shed in the fall here. Others shed in the spring with
the new growth pushing the very hard Southern Oak leaves out of their
sockets just in time for the flowers to bloom, then fall out in massive
flower storms to clog every port on every car they blow into...a real
mess.

SC farmers are, mostly, way too lazy to dairy farm. There are few dairy
farms across the state. They raise cash crops like soybeans, tobacco,
stuff that is nearly plant-and-forget-until-harvest, except for a few bug
sprayings, mostly from airplanes. The rich outer sea islands have very
fertile ground for vegetable crops, melons, we even have a historic TEA
plantation, the only one inside the USA, right here in Charleston. We
used to be famous, back in the plantation days, for rice. The place is
covered with abandoned rice paddies, now grown over with weeds just
itching to clog a prop if you get out of the channel.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.

When I was young, in the 1950's, NY state had terrible snow storms from
the Great Lakes "Lake Effect" snows. It was frigid cold and the local
lake, Owasco Lake, ring finger of the upstate Finger Lakes region, froze
so solid you could drive a snowplow-equipped dump truck out in the middle
of it and plow the snow off the ice to make a car/motorcycle race
track...right in the middle of the lake. I spent many days with my
grandfather, sitting in his gas mantle lantern-heated ice fishing shack
on skis we towed out at 3AM to clean out the ice fishing holes and set
the "tip ups", an automatic snatching rig, spring loaded to set the hooks
of any fish that bit the little minnow wiggling on the hook below. The
holes were augered into the ice with a special gasoline powered auger
drill and the ice was about 1-2 ft thick, where the fish wintered in
warmer water on the bottom. That same lake, now that the sun has
increased in intensity in one of its pulsating cycles, hardly freezes
over and certainly not hard enough to drive on, any more. My time in the
1950's is during the 1940-1975 cooling period the Global Warming Business
has amnesia about....right when Americans drove these awful gasoline
beasts, heated their houses with gun oil furnaces and lit the lights with
coal-fired huge electric plants. So much for man-made global warming
nonsense. It was DEATHLY COLD! Of course, that wouldn't create massive
government grants to fight global warming, which is caused by the big
thermonuclear star 93M miles away....(sigh). Man can't stand it when HE
doesn't control everything.


Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.

Not exactly. What would happen some time is the powerlines were simply
bowled over by shifting snow several feet thick, sort of like a mini
glacier. At other times, overzealous snowplow crews put too much snow up
against them and they broke off at the base. Cars drove in snow canyons,
especially after the invention of the snow blowers mounted on heavy
trucks. In grade school (primary school) we got Mimeographed handouts
from the power company, New York State Electric and Gouge, warning us NOT
to touch any high voltage overhead power lines we could reach with a
stick if we stood on top of the snow banks the plows had piled up after a
big storm. The banks were THAT high! My grandparents had a lake house,
where they lived most of the time. It had a back door on the first
floor, for summer, and on the second floor, for sometimes in winter when
the first floor was "undersnow".

This snow mass, near the edges of spring, would also melt during the day,
freeze hard again at night, creating a layered cake of solid ice over
snow over solid ice over snow by spring. Any warm spell made a new ice
sheet of the snow piled up everywhere....great for walking or hunting
until it got unstable and you fell through it on every step, ripping your
skin open on the jagged ice edges of the hole your boot made.

Every spring, of course, there would be a sudden warm period, melting
vast fields of deep snow quite quickly. This caused every stream to
become a torrent, every river to flood like hell and the lake to
overflow, flooding the whole valley even with the flood gates running
wide open. My grandparents' lake house, of course, took this into
consideration. It was on pilings, as were all the others, to allow the
lake to just run under it at will until it drained away. You parked way
up the road where it was out of the water and rode the aluminum fishing
boat with 7.5hp Evinrude Sportwin outboard to the house. There were
cleats by the back door and all the neighbors would help each other move
their lake docks up to the back doors of the houses during floods to tie
boats up to...creating each house as an island...complete with power,
heat, water, etc....an inconvenience, not a catastrophy like New Orleans.
The flood waters were 0.01C so we didn't do much diving off the roof into
the lake water covering up the road....(c; You had two choices to visit
the neighbors...take the boat or use your waders...your choice.

As this melt subsided, a wonderful little silver fish called "S'melt"
started running up every creek out of the lake to spawn. You were only
allowed 4 buckets of S'melt per day catch limit with your dipnets. There
were MILLIONS of them in every little creek for a couple of weeks until
the eggs were laid for next year. S'melt are amazingly easy to cook and
eat, being just bigger than a minnow. Their entire body was what you
ate. All their organs were contained right below the head just forward
of their gills. You simply cut them behind the gills and threw them into
the deep fat fryer you'd find us kids staring into waiting to see them
float (done) a few seconds later. To eat them, you simply put them into
your mouth, tail sticking out, lightly bit down just ahead of the tail
and pull the tail out....complete with all their bones....too easy! I
could still eat a hundred....(c; A little lemon sauce to dip them in is
nice. I'm not sure if they still run like that, now. The old lake is so
polluted by the damned sewage plants the Federal bureaucrats forced on
all the little towns there are huge algae blooms and lots of lake
pollution. When I lived there, you could drink the lake water, and we
did! Not any more. Everyone used to have cesspools and septic tanks
with drainage fields in the fast draining gravel soils of the valley.
How stupid to change what worked for 300 years.

It was a fantastic place to grow up. When I call my old friends I grew
up with who never left the town, I always ask them, "What day was Summer
this year?"....(c;