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nafex - [NAFEX] The weather!!!

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  • From: "Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] The weather!!!
  • Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 09:48:47 -0600

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




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