April Showers bring...?

Well, it's April, and I'm still rather behind on the gardening chores. No news, I suppose. Every year I print off a 12-month calendar from the web to keep track of the garden chores and notable occurrences in the garden and around the farm. Maybe it's the biologist in me coupled with a poor memory that makes the garden calendar so useful. To date, I'm working on year five of the calendar, and it's a surprisingly helpful reference tool. I often use the previous years' calendars to remind me what I need to be doing. For instance, as I write this article, I know I'm decidedly behind on sowing peas.

There's a whole "-ology" devoted to the science of time and nature: Phenology. The formal definition is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially about climate and plant and animal life. While the definition sounds fancy, it's pretty simple to keep track of key phenological occurrences around your house with the printable calendar mentioned above. Examples of notable "events" are when the daffodils bloom when you see the first Towhee, Kingbird, or Wren, your last frost date, when the lilacs bloom, and when the leaf-cutter bees appear, etc. You can also track changes as we head into fall. The sequence of trees changing colors, flowers going to seed, bird species transitioning to the winter residents, and the last frost date are all useful information to have at your fingertips as the seasons progress.

While keeping a yearly log of phenological dates along with your planting/harvesting calendar is useful, it's not infallible. Last year, we had a relatively warm spring that jumpstarted fruit trees to bloom a few weeks early, only to be followed by a deep freeze (the nights of April 11th and 12th, to be precise). That event caused a significant and, at least for me, a total loss to fruit tree production for the year. Nature is stochastic, after all, and every year is different. As you build your calendar over the years, you can begin to see when a year looks to be ahead or behind "schedule" and adjust accordingly.

While it's fun to read back on past calendars and know when to expect each change of the season, phenology actually plays a critical role in the larger study of climate change. Long-term datasets are crucial in understanding how plants and animals might respond to changing weather patterns across the globe. Data have shown mismatches among plants, animals, and the seasons in terms of migration timing, bud break, and insect emergence. For example, should birds migrate north too early, there may be no insects or flowers out yet to sustain them. An interesting local anecdote I've heard is that there have been multiple occurrences in recent years of hummingbirds overwintering in the Walla Walla Valley, which assuredly is not the norm.

Climate change aside, I'll lob a few phenological predictions out for the Waitsburg area for the next few weeks. Soon, you should see the first ladybugs, butterflies, and asparagus harvests. That should be followed a week or so later by apple trees blooming and the hummingbirds' return. My house is a bit higher in elevation, so I'm a few weeks behind Waitsburg. Still, as of the time I'm writing this article, we just welcomed our first apricot and daffodil blooms of the year and are anxiously awaiting the first Bullock's Oriole to the yard.

Based on my calendar and the daffodils in bloom, my unavoidable weekend chore will be getting those peas in the ground. As the old Chinese proverb goes, "Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men."