Spring came very early in 2010. Do you remember? April was very pleasant and mild, even warm. May was coolish.
I remember as a child in the early 1940s an April Easter Sunday was featured with ice and snow nearly everywhere. The days would be sunny, but wintery and cold.
I much prefer our current delivery of Spring. I am rooting for a Zone 5 growing zone. We are almost there. One would think most Minnesotans would welcome the pleasant warm April breezes and beautiful spring flowers. After all, Spring is supposed to begin in March!
We are told this new kind of new kind of Minnesota April is bad and certain politicians want to do something to put it back into the frigid zones. Even if these people dont block out a portion of the sun, we are told by most cold country scientists like the Russian ones, who really are at the icecicle end of the climate change front, that the Earth will be cooling again for the next 75 or so years.
Did you know that when I was a boy discovering the names of the birds flying around me, there were no cardinals in the Twin City area? They joined us when the climate improved for us Minnesotans as well.
We also have had a very moist 2010 growing season. Not only a very moist one, but a season in which precipitation was quite reliable…..about every second or third day there would a steady bit of water dropping our way.
Those of you who have visited my landscape garden know I tolerate a lot of gigas (Korean angelica). It is a very strange appearing biennial which usually rises to six or seven feet and comes into “bloom” beginning in early September.
This year, this biennial has appeared moody. I have grown them for about ten years, but not in the numbers as they now occur……around 100….or 1,000 if you count all of this year’s ‘pop-ups’ greening up to do their blooming thing next season.
I cull dozens per day.
Many of this year’s crop are over ten feet tall with stalks over five inches in diameter at the ground level. Their flower branchings are like octopus tentacles reaching everywhere…..some so cumbersome and heavy the plant cannot withstand the weight.
Moreover, about half of them are well into sinescence. In collection they look like an unharvested cornfield in October…..except for the maroon and browning tentacles reaching out everywhere.
I am wondering why. Such sizes and early sinescence have not happened in my gardens before. My unscientific answer is thus:
1. The size of plants is due to the regular reliability of water. Gigas do like more water than less. That I have noticed other seasons.
2. The early season in spring perhaps is the reason the plants are dying earlier. Some plants seem to have a clock system which confines their life time rather specifically. Gigas is a biennial…..which means it goes from life (seed germination) to seed production and death in two growing seasons. It can do not other program. Its clock must have struck “twelve midnight” early this year….if my guessing is correct.
Another weather note: When the 90 degree temperatures did arrive in July and August, not only was the soil moisture sufficient, but the heat did not last for more than a few days in a row.
Those of us who garden have to make a lot of guesses every growing season. No season is ever quite the same.