Hi Folks. An old friend of mine just showed me this cool site. It allows you to look at trend lines for any county in the USA for various temperature statistics. The ones that seemed most valuable to us are:
  • You can look at the number of days in a year where the temp drops under 32
  • You can look at the number of days in a year where the temp drops under any arbitrary number (like a proper freeze might be 25)
Here's the site: https://cmintemp.scipp.lsu.edu/. You can do it either on your phone or on a computer, but the charts it makes look much better on a computer.

Just as an example, in the Hampshire County, MA, where I do my sugaring, it shows that we lose 3.1 days per decade of number of days under freezing. So from 1951 to today, the average has dropped from about 159 to about 136. Not too terrible, but unfortunately, things are similar in some of the southern counties I looked at, like in West Virginia. But they started off with 100 days in 1951. That drops you to an unsustainable rate pretty soon.

I sure wish we could post photos, a picture is worth a thousand words. But check it out yourself.

GO