Friday, April 27, 2012

How vegetable gardens can adapt to changing temperatures and unpredictable weather


Being in tune with your local climate is one of most important success factors for gardening. Climate change has complicated the picture for vegetable gardeners, but there is a silver lining. With the right knowledge at the right time, food gardeners can actually grow more because of climate change.
Changing climate has in general brought greater extremes of temperatures with warmer and longer summers and often more extreme cold in winter, but on average, higher temperatures throughout the year. Food gardeners are finding that choosing vegetable crops with the methods they have always used is giving them results they don’t expect.

…….Vegetables are very sensitive to temperatures at planting and over their growing period. Frost is a killer for many vegetables. If you plant too early or too late in the season you may be hit with frost. If it is hotter earlier in the season, there are many crops you could get underway which you would not normally grow at that time and because of extended warm periods you could be staging your crops for much greater production. There may be crops that you thought would not grow at all, but are actually now very suitable for your climate.

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