It's okay to wish for early crocuses
I'm always of two minds
about the first spring flowers. On the one hand, I really, really
want to see them, not just for myself, but for my hungry bees. But
on the other hand, I know that early blooms on the fruit trees often
mean no harvest that year due to late freezes. So I decided to
poke back through the blog to determine when our peaches and crocuses
have bloomed in past years, and how that relates to the subsequent peach
harvest:
| Year |
First crocus bloom |
Peaches at first pink stage |
Peaches harvested? |
| 2013 |
1/31 |
4/5 |
Yes |
| 2012 |
2/3 |
3/15 |
No |
| 2011 |
2/20 |
3/22 |
Yes |
| 2010 |
3/7 |
4/3 |
Yes |
| 2009 |
2/28 |
3/23 |
No |
The
first thing I noticed --- late peach blooms do seem to be correlated to
an actual peach harvest that year. But do early crocus blooms
mean no peach harvest? Nope. In fact, the date of the first
crocus blooms seems to have very little bearing on when the peach
flowers open, suggesting that the two plants are using different cues
to decide on the proper time to pop open their flowers. (Last
year's crocus blooms might have been a bit of an outlier, though,
because I had transplanted the bulbs in late winter to a new location.)
This post is all a long
and geeky way of saying --- okay, crocuses, open up those buds!
And, peaches, stay sound asleep as long as you can. Because, of
course my plants listen to my wishes, right? (Maybe I should hedge
my bets by dumping the ice from my maple sap concentration campaign around the bases of our fruit trees.)
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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