Days are getting longer minutes each day. Pictures of spring and summer.

​IT is cold out.  Hard to imagine what -40 below zero wind chill feels like.  I need to go out and check greenhouse and feed the cats, then I will know. 
 
Australia family and friends are having a warm spell for their summer.  Saturday Jan 24 they will have 87F(31C) with 87% humidity.  This is their last weekend of summer break and school starts next week.  “Australia day is Monday, teachers on Tuesday and kids go back on Wed.”  Evelyn wrote. 
 
I found this article that was written in December but still have information about the length of daylight.  The days are getting longer.  Hope is near for more sunshine and more heat out of the sun. 
 
How Much Daylight Do We Gain After the Winter Solstice?
The real news is that we will have the fewest minutes of daylight in 2025. On the solstice in December, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have our shortest day and our longest night. Starting Monday, December 22, the days will start getting longer, and the Sun will be slightly higher up in the sky. We’ll start feeling greater warmth on our skin, too! Solar intensity depends on the Sun’s height. But since the ground and the air take a while to catch up, we won’t reach our coldest average temperature until the third week of January,
As for things you can easily observe, the most obvious solstitial effect is that you can look out your most southwest-facing window on Saturday and again on Sunday and see the Sun set at its leftmost position of the year. If you’re an early riser and see the Sun come up at around 7:15 AM, that will happen at its rightmost possible spot, in the east/southeast.  I notice this when sitting in the living room and looking east talking to Larry.  In the summer the sun is in my eyes from the east windows, but in the window I see the sunrise in the south windows. 
The psychologically optimistic part of all this is that starting on December 22, 2025, we will stop losing daily sunlight, which has been going on since June, and instead finally start to increase it!  This gain will be, just a matter of seconds a day, but will steadily grow until daily daylight expands by 3 minutes per day in March.   in most of the lower 48 states, the extra daily sunshine in March is closer to 20 minutes after each week, the most the majority of us ever experience, like a slowly opened gift package.
Let’s take a more relatable location in the Midwest, Chicago.
If you look at the Almanac’s daylight tool for Chicago, there are just 9 hours, 11 minutes of daylight during the week leading up to Christmas.
After this, daylight increases to 9 hours, 15 minutes by New Year’s Day.
By mid-January, the daily increase of light jumps to about 2 minutes a day.
By the 20th of February, daylight gain speeds up to 3 minutes per day! On the 20th, the day length is 10 hours, 53 minutes, and on the 21st, it’s 10 hours, 56 minutes.
In May, the increase slows back to 2 minutes gain per day
By the time we get to the summer solstice, the increase further slows to 1 minute a day, peaking at 15 hours and 16 minutes by the solstice.
But to include other astronomy into all this, be aware that a radical planet change is also en route to us. Right now, at the winter solstice, every planet is nicely visible, while late spring will find them vanishing one by one.
So, this winter solstice is really a time of major activity here in the old solar system.
Taken from https://www.almanac.com/how-much-daylight-do-we-gain-after-winter-solstice
Till next time this is Becky Litterer, Becky’s Greenhouse, Dougherty Iowa [email protected]  641-794-3337  cell 641-903-9365  Beckysgreenhouse.com  Facebook Becky Kerndt Litterer or Becky’s Greenhouse