Average weather

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Average weather

Average temperatures on our farm Long-term readers have probably noticed that I'm a big fan of numbers and graphs, so you won't be surprised to hear that I peruse local climate data with a fine-tooth comb. Back in my wandering years, my favorite way of getting to know a new area was making a graph of the monthly average highs and lows and the inches of precipitation. I generally had to dig pretty deep to find that information, then graph it myself, so I was thrilled to find Weather.com's average climate feature.

The link above takes you to information for the town where I spent a lot of my childhood which is only about 50 miles away from where I now live. The geekiest among you may enjoy comparing data from my hometown to data from my current town --- if Weather.com can be trusted, my current location is 8.5 inches wetter than my hometown! Although the data says that we're only two tenths of a degree colder here on average, I suspect that information is less relevant to our homestead --- without any pavement nearby, our farm's temperatures are regularly as much as five degrees colder than the website reports for our nearest town.

Average precipitation on our farm The real reason I looked up this data, though, was to remind myself that we're on the upswing of the year. Although just the word "February" is enough to make me shiver, the cold hard facts say that February isn't all that cold or hard. In fact, January is our coldest month --- maybe my boots won't be freezing to the floor any more in a few weeks.

Dealing with a hot summer or a cold winter? Our homemade chicken waterer will help your flock cope.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.

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This trait is a direct inheritance from your grandfather, Adrian Eckberg. He kept daily records of rainfall, high and low temperature, and who knows what else. Now that I think of it, you and he are similar in many ways. He was a researcher way before the internet made it easy. When I said I'd like to do a hydroelectric generator on our farm creek he researched the drainage area and rainfall statistics and said there wasn't enough water.

Comment by Errol — Thu Jan 13 09:56:45 2011