Equal and opposite, summer-winter, and poor man’s fertilizer by Dennis Forney

*A thick blanket of snow across the Delmarva Peninsula may bring farmers a bit of welcome relief from the high cost of commercial fertilizer.*

Here on Delmarva, the past summer was brutal: extremely hot and extremely dry.

Now the principle of equal and opposite settles in; every action producing an equal and opposite reaction.

This winter, starting 2025, is bringing extreme cold and lots of precipitation.

Shades of the winters of 1977 and 1978. Several days of single-digit temperatures in early January 1977 locked the peninsula’s waterways in thick ice, from the Atlantic to the Chesapeake. Too cold even to snow. Cars-driving-over-bays-and-rivers kind of ice. Watermen, desperate to tong a few bushels of oysters to make some money, had to break ice many days in a row to reach beds under open water.

Then followed 1978’s winter with epic blizzards bringing the peninsula’s activity to a standstill as surely as ice had done the year before.

Looking ahead: Maybe some January thaw this weekend with higher temperatures and rain, only to usher in our first string of single-digit temps next week. Prayer: Please rain, help wash away some of this snow-converted-to-ice leading to falls, and at least one death I’ve heard of along the coast. A cracked head with no recovery.

Maybe rain will have more compassion than Mother Nature. Nature doesn’t care.

From bay to ocean, thick snow continues to blanket farm fields across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Poor man’s fertilizer it is often called, and not without merit.

Our atmosphere is made up of something like 70 percent nitrogen. Scientists tell us that descending snowflakes attach to nitrates on their way down. They lay the green-giving nutrients across the soil in a beautifully uniform fashion, and release them slowly into the earth as the snow melts and seeps toward hungry roots.

Free fertilizer offers a welcome premonition of good crops when winter eventually gives way to spring and the next planting season.

Commercial nitrogen fertilizer is expensive. The poorman’s variety, like a rising tide lifting all boats equally, can ease some of the wallet pressure and with that a worthy smile.

Stay warm and spread a little love around.

*In a marshy island of the Choptank River, just below the Dover Bridge crossing, what appears to be a colony of muskrat houses hold on to pieces of the persistent recent snowfall. DENNIS FORNEY PHOTOS.*

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972. He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.