Friday, August 9, 2019

Back in June on Child Dome

Harmon Farm on Child Dome Road -- private property but with an agricultural preservation easement that should hopefully keep this amazing 180 plus degree northern view open for all time.

This is part of the "Woodstock Drumlin Field" that stands in complete contrast to the adjacent ledge-riddled Bull Hill.

If you really wanted to divide the soils of Connecticut into convenient categories, you could start with the worst ones, which would be the sugar maple country, the bush pasture, the ledge country. This is too rough for cultivation or really mowing, or even good pasture.
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One of the other most distinctive soil types are these upland soils that you see here in drumlins. A drumlin is a rounded hill that formed when the stony, silty, clay rich paste being carried along the base a glacier was literally smeared across the bottom of the landscape where it developed into these really lovely rounded and streamlined shapes.

So a drumlin is one conspicuous landform in Connecticut. These drumlins lent themselves very well for pasture because they were very good at holding water. It wouldn t run off the way it would it ledgy terrain or soak in quickly. In very sandy terrains, the rainwater would simply infiltrate straight through the sand down to the water table and the grass would parch fairly early. But in drumlin terrain, the rainfall would get absorbed into the silt and clay and last and last and last. So the hills would stay green, right up to their summits, through much of the summers.

A drumlin is an ideal soil not so much for agricultural tillage but for pasture. They just grew grass luxuriously. So when you would have lowland terraces parched, when you would have lowland soils boggy, these soils would tend to be easy to walk on, easy to pasture, easy to mow, easy to cut, because of the smooth shape and the absence of truly jagged ledge.
http://www.westonps.org/uploaded/faculty/pattynizlek//Drumlins_in_Connecticut.pdf

I was hoping to get some shots of lightning, which never did set up -- I left as the rain got to me, and ended up driving through hail (so I hid the car under some trees figuring that would break the hail up a bit). Stopped to get gas in Dudley, and watched a cluster of 7 lightning strikes while filling my car :D The lightning ended up developing just south of where I had been looking north.

Canon EOS 50D,0.003125 1/320, f/7.1, focal length 18, ISO 100

1 comment:

Donna. W said...

Beautiful picture.