Planting by the trees
"I
have a hypothesis that the last chance of frost is past when the pecan
trees are in full leaf," my father posited. "What do you think?"
The idea appealed to me,
in part because of the old saying that it's
safe to plant
your corn when the oak leaves are the size of a
squirrel's ear.
I saw oak leaves twice this big a week ago along with volunteer squash,
tomatoes, and sunflowers. Ever since, I've been pondering whether
I'm really going to put out
half of my summer garden three weeks before the frost-free
date.
Meanwhile, the
scientific side of my mind sidetracked into finding out what cues trees
use to
decide when to leaf out. The only options I could come up with
are soil
temperature, air
temperature, and day length, all three of
which (along with the ten day weather forecast) are what I use to
determine my own planting schedule. A search of the internet,
though, suggests that our trees are keeping track of how much cold
weather they've faced, and when they think they've had enough, they
leaf out (as long as the air is warm enough.) That would mean
that an abornmally cold winter (like
this past one) would produce an early spring (like this one) since the
trees would have counted up the required number of chilly days earlier
than usual.
Put that way, I'm not so sure
I want to base my planting date on our trees' decisions. However,
the soil has warmed to 60 degrees and
the ten day weather forecast predicts no lows beneath the mid forties,
so I went ahead and planted green beans, corn, squash, melons and
cucumbers (in quick
hoops), okra, mung
beans, and basil, along with
sunflowers, millet, ground cherries, and amaranth in the forest pasture. I'm going to hold off
on putting out my homegrown pepper sets, though, until the night lows
are just a bit higher.
How about you? Are
there trees that you feel confident predict the time to plant your
summer garden?
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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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My husband's uncle who has lived on this land for half a century now swears to me that when the pecans have buds (I havent yet checked to see if he is talking about leaves or flowers, but I suspect leaf buds) then spring is here. I've planted early, and he has confirmed up to two weeks later that it's spring, but my plantings have been successful anyway. This year I took a risk and planted some things incredibly early and he was timid about it, but he got back to me within the week to let me know it was okay, the pecan buds were coming out.
So I don't use the trees myself, but I do get this kind of feedback from time to time on the relationship between the weather and the trees. I haven't gone so far as to test it, but I think it would definitely be interesting to take a closer look.
Last year we had some trees that started flowering in January during a relatively warm spell after a cold winter. Subsequently all those buds froze off.
Obviously whatever mechanism the trees use has evolved over a long time and is therefore probably good enough in general.
But the weather can depend on so many things that accurate and precise predictions (not generalities) might well turn out to be practically impossible.