The growing season ...

The length and timing of the local growing season is of keen interest to the home gardener.  You want to start growing things at the earliest possible moment, and grow things for as long as you can to maximize your harvest. A good starting place is to consult an almanac for your area. The almanac that I have found most useful over the years is The Old Farmer's Almanac. Besides the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, this almanac has much other useful information about home gardening.

Consulting the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, I discover that the growing season for my location begins on May 24th and ends on September 27th, for a growing season that is 125 days long. Of course, the earnest gardener will want to push that envelope as much as possible, both at the start of the season by sprouting seeds indoors and using cold frames, and at the end of the season by using frost covers and prayer.

Since temperature is the key here, a useful tool for the gardener is some sort of minimum - maximum thermometer that allows you to see just how cold the nights are and just how warm it is during the days. There are many designs of these, and I purchased an inexpensive electronic one that has a remote wireless sensor which is located in the garden and a display that I have located conveniently indoors. I kept track of the daily variations and made a graph of the beginning of this growing season. Here is what it looks like:

What the graph shows is that Spring came early this year by about 16 days. The last time the low temperature fell to 0°C was on May 8th. This means an extra two weeks of gardening this year. Wooo! As is usual with these things though, there is of course, a downside. The biggest lesson that we have learned from the ecologists is that everything in our living world is interconnected . Having the first frost free date come two weeks early has implications that we might not understand at all.

As an example, suppose there is a species of bird that migrates north and nests early in the Spring. This species times the hatching of its young to the outbreak of a specific insect, insuring that there will be plenty of food for its nestlings. Now, imagine what happens when the insect hatches out two weeks early. There will not be enough food for our nestlings and the population of that particular bird species will fall this year. Naturalists are noticing more and more of these sort of interactions every day now.

There are unknown millions of these interactions in the world around us. This is why global warming should be of tremendous concern for all of us. A similar interaction with serious implications for us humans could come out of left field at any time and take us by surprise. Think again, for a moment, of the surprise the parent birds got when they discovered that there was no food to feed their hatchlings.