Two weeks ago I wrote about the old Fairview gold mine. One of my faithful readers gave me some new information about it. The mine closed for good in 1959. The dynamite that was left in the mine was reported to the RCMP in 1966 and the police removed all of it at that time.
On a different note, I came across another interesting column by Wally Smith. It is of interest to me because of how long ago it was written. It is a good comparison to todays climate.
It is entitled, It’s Been a Lovely Spring, and was published May 29th, 1975.
Wally runs the title in with the first sentence, it goes like this…..It’s Been a Lovely Spring, or has? Well, that all depends on your point of view.
You will not have to look far to find persons who will say it has been a terrible spring — cold, windy, lacking in bright spring sunshine that is expected in the sunny Okanagan.
They are selfish. They want it all their own way; not for any particular reason but just to satisfy their own whim and fancy.
Me, I’m selfish too, but for a different reason. I like this kind of spring. As a fruit grower I am painfully aware that spring weather, especially frosty spring nights, can destroy a lot of fruit blossoms and reduce grower income by half or more.
Warm sunny days in April and early May usually are followed by clear cold nights with the temperature sometimes dropping below freezing level at the critical time when fruit trees are in bloom.
The unfortunate grower caught in that position has a fight on his hands. If he is keeping close tab on the weather he will have tuned in on the 8 p.m. radio frost and wind warning service and checked his thermometers two or three times before going to bed.
If a killing frost is forecast, the grower will be up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. to read the temperature and light his heaters if necessary. Fighting frost with oil or gas heaters can be an expensive business. A grower may spend several hundred dollars on heating fuel and lose a lot of sleep staying up to guard his crop.
Every spring for the 14 of the last 15 years I have been fighting late spring frosts that endangered my crop. Last year I fired on four nights; in 1973 I fired my heaters on four nights; in 1972 I lit up on six nights, and so on away back to the spring of 1960.
This spring of 1975 it has not been necessary to light my orchard heaters even once, and now, starting the last week in May one could see the danger of frost is past.
I don’t mind if spring days are cool, cloudy and windy so long as the nights are cloudy or windy to fend off the frost air that sometimes endangers the fruit crop.
That’s are the kind of nights we have been getting this spring and it has kept the frost out of my orchard and saved me money and loss of sleep.
Yes, it has been a lovely spring.
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