Good Questions: Fall/Autumn, Acorns & Frost
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- It's Friday, so we're answering some of your Good Questions. This week: Fall/autumn, acorns and frost.
Pam from Owatonna asks: Why does fall/autumn have two names?
Long before fall and autumn, our third season used to be called harvest. According to Anatoly Liberman, a professor in the German, Scandinavian & Dutch department at the University of Minnesota, autumn (a noun of French origin) competed with fall since the days of Shakespeare in England. Right around that time, the first settlers to U.S. brought the word "fall" with them.
"Apparently, it was common in their dialect, the reference being to 'the fall of the leaf,'" says Liberman. "And it stayed."
Kathy from Cottage Grove and Paul from Coon Rapids asked about acorns. Their trees aren't producing them this year and they want to know why.
Val Cervenka, a forest health program coordinator with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, says the lack of acorns this year this is nothing to worry about. Red oaks produce acorns every other year. White oaks produce them every year. But, last year there was a big bumper crop for acorns. Many of those trees used so much energy last year producing acorns that they don't have enough to make more this year.
"Even with trees that produce acorns every year, there's still a cycle of boom or bust," says Cervenka. Experts aren't exactly sure why.
Rhoda from Edina asks: When is the latest we've had a frost?
Frost is officially defined by the National Weather Service as a 32 degree temperature reading measured at the airport. That usually happens in the Twin Cities by Oct. 6. The latest 32 degree temp in recent history was Oct. 30 -- back in 1973. As for a hard freeze, defined as 28 degrees, the latest on recent record was Nov. 20, 2015.
