Looking south toward southeastern part of farm from the southern portion of our 20 acre woodlot.
Photo taken by Catherine Fox.

First off, everyone at Magicland Farms (Tom, Annemarie, Mark, Matthew, Bernadette, Rebekah, Catherine and Kelly) wants to wish you and your family a joyous and Blessed 2010!

A New Year has started and along with a new year we will now have a new web host – FatCow.  Yes, that’s right!  No joke!  Our old web host, Geocities/Yahoo, has eliminated their geocities division and wanted us to switch to Yahoo.  Well, we decided against that and they have not allowed us to update our website any longer.  In fact, we couldn’t make any updates after October 24!

While we are switching over to FatCow, our website might be offline for a short time.  We just want to let you know we are still here even if our website will perhaps disappear for a time and, in fact, we have already ordered most of our seeds for the next growing season!

In addition to having a new website host, we plan on having a completely new website design.  Catherine is scheduled to design this new website and if you have any comments or suggestions you can contact her at webmaster@magiclandfarms.com.  By the way, our address for our website will remain the same- www.magiclandfarms.com

The apples we have in storage are keeping well and we plan on opening our door sometime in late March or early April for apple sales.  Nearly all long range forecasts are for a relatively early spring so we thought we might as well take advantage of it and open things early!  Shortly before we open up for apple sales, we will be sending out a newsletter to let you know what we have for sale and their prices, where they will be for sale and when they will be for sale.

A quick suggestion – use the signup box on the right sidebar to  receive our newsletter – blog posting gets very sporadic during harvest season and the newsletter, which goes out weekly,  will keep you up to date with what’s happening at Magicland Farms.

The folks at Magicland Farms

Today we have a guest post by Magicland Farms’ resident weather guru AKA The Boss:

If you look back at my 2009 summer forecast you might think I goofed big time but I forgot to mention the forecast was for Texas and not Michigan! Just teasin’. By the way Texas did have one of the hottest summers ever although if you took a leisurely summer afternoon’s drive north you might have shut off your car’s A/C just as the sun got low in the sky.

Let’s look again at the few sentences that form the heart of my summer of 2009 forecast:

The point here is that I assumed when I made the forecast that sunspots were about to reappear. This was what was forecast to happen based on hundreds of years of observation. But the sunspots never appeared all summer and fall. Just didn’t happen.

Even though the lack of sunspots was really weird, I did mention this possibility in my forecast. Here is a sentence I copied from that 2009 summer forecast:

While no one knows for sure why this occurs: hot summers being associated with the return of the sunspots and not by the actual number of sunspots, one possible explanation follows:

Think of the sun as a pot of very hot water near its boiling point, say 205F. If you keep the heat on low to keep the water on at 205F nothing seems to happen. Then you turn the knob on the stove to medium and as the water rises to near boiling (212F at sea level) bubbles of water vapor will start at the bottom of the pot and float toward the surface. Probably a similar thing happens to the sun when there are no sunspots. The temperature is a bit below some critical point (which must be somewhere around 100 million degrees in its center although the sun’s surface is a relatively cool 10,000F) Then when the sun’s internal temperature increases, bubbles start forming deep down and rise to the surface, creating the sunspots.. Exactly how long it takes from the time the sun’s internal temperature rises to the time the sunspots form is a guess, although it’s probably closer to days or weeks rather than minutes and hours. A hotter sun of course usually means warmer land temperatures especially during the summer in areas north of the tropic of Cancer or south of the tropic of Capricorn, which includes all of the continental United States.

While there are other factors to consider, such as the El Nino which looks right now it will turn into a whopper (however, El Nino’s significance regarding summer weather is an unknown quantity), my 2010 forecast is for another return to the summers of the mid 1950s. Hopefully, the summers of the 1930s won’t ever return. This isn’t simply hope, since the summers in the mid 1930s likely were so extreme because of the farming practices that helped create the dustbowl which caused a drought or perhaps vice versa. Excessively dry soils, as meteorologists know, are associated with above normal air temperatures because the sun doesn’t expend its energy in evaporating water all it needs to do is warm the ground and air which uses quite a bit less energy than changing water from liquid to its gaseous state.

The bottom line. Look for a hot dry summer throughout the Midwest including Newaygo County Michigan and Magicland Farms. Of course, if the sunspots fade away in spring and summer, which would be truly startling, forget my forecast.

FYI: The latest NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center’s June, July, August (Summer 2010) prediction is for normal temperatures in Newaygo County, Michigan and the Midwest in general. Joe Bastardi from Accuweather hasn’t publicly issued a forecast yet and it is hard to determine yet what he thinks.

I want to apologize to anyone who made a comment on my summer 2009 post and I failed to respond. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to look over any comments to the blog and respond in a timely manner. I do greatly appreciate any comments and I want to encourage them.