North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

While it is unseasonably warm in the eastern US and western Europe, that it 
has been unseasonably cold in India and western US.  Back after the drought 
in England in 1976 I read that the jet stream, seen from above the North 
Pole, tends to take the shape of a 4 pointed star.  It's shape is partly 
controlled by the land masses below it, which tend to make it fairly stable. 
That year it switched to a 5 pointed star.  You can imagine that places 
where cool air tends to go south, and where warm air tends to go north, were 
now all changed.  Weather patterns we are used to, dry air from deserts, 
warm moist air from large bodies of water, now went somewhere else.
   I can't seem to find any serious discussion of this sort of thing on the 
Net anywhere.  The population of Earth is almost entirely dependent on 
agriculture, and agriculture is dependent on knowing what the weather is 
going to be like.  The Irish grow potatoes Africans grow millet because cool 
wet weather favors one and hot dry weather favors the other.  Yet one year 
not long ago the two climates seem to have switched without giving prior 
notice to the farmers.
   Annual crops are one thing, but we NAFEXers are betting even more 
heavily on the continuity of weather patterns when we plant trees.  As much 
as we in the southeast gnash our teeth over the unpredictability of our 
weather, at least we try to plant some things that are not affected much by 
late freezes.  By contrast,California and  the Pacific Northwest have been 
able to grow tree crops that depend on mild winters and nice safe springs.
   I don't know about the rest of you, but we don't set too much store by 
peaches and plums here in Tennessee.   Sometimes they crop, often they 
don't.  In 2006 we went down to 23 degrees while the pears were in bloom, 
and much to my surprise, there was almost no persimmon crop either.  I 
thought persimmons were pretty much immune to late frosts because they bud 
out and bloom so very late, practically summer.  Yet the only persimmons I 
saw all year (not that there are many trees in our area, for some reason I 
can't fathom) were on a tree that grows low under a cedar protected from the 
wind.  It appears to me that the freeze got the persimmons too then. 
Chestnuts seem to be one of the few trees not affected at all last year. 
There WERE peaches from the Silver point orchard and apples from the 
Sequatchie Valley as usual, on sites that I am sure were carefully selected 
for orchards.     Donna