Our good friend Bob is a weather stick maker. This is local lore that has been passed down from the old timers. The best weather sticks are made of hemlock but some makers also use fir. These trees respond in amazing ways to the changes in humidity and predict the weather by pointing their branches up or down. There is a bit of a learning curve with them though since they predict pretty far ahead and within a pretty wide radius.
Bob came up to our home one day to look for a suitable tree on our own property. We walked through the woods but didn’t find any. Then later, when we cleared out some paths to our maple trees in preparation for sugaring next spring, we found one and cut it down. We promptly hauled it down to Bob at the bottom of our hill who watched it for a while and then cut three branches out of it for weather sticks. We’ve mounted two of them – one on the front porch and one out the kitchen window. The third one is in the mud room waiting for a home.
These pictures show our weather stick predicting good weather (pointing way up), changing, and predicting bad weather (pointing way down). Isn’t it amazing how much they bend?
You can read more about weather sticks here.
Those are really cool!
Pretty amazing! I wonder if a VT weather stick could also predict the weather in say, Pennsylvania? Or do they only predict weather in their area of origin?
🙂
I, Bob have sent these sticks to many different places and all the way to South Africa, and they always work the same as they do in Ludlow, Vermont!