The trouble with weather and its effects

When did weather become so troublesome? I’m not talking about weather itself. I’m referring to the way we talk about it. There have always been floods and droughts, periods of deep cold and stretches of sweltering heat, tornadoes and hurricanes. Rather, I want to know: When did meteorologists start calling anything less than sunny and warm “bad” weather?

I pose the question both as a gardener who welcomes a day or two of rain that relieves me of the chore of watering the gardens. The gardener in me also appreciates the fact that long periods of subfreezing temperatures can help keep some insects at bay. Plus, as a former New Englander, I outright enjoy snow and cold.

I just had some surgery on my hand and am reduced to typing one-handed for a while, so I’m going to finish this thought for now and continue with a column I wrote in January 2007 in the middle of an unseasonably warm stretch of weather. Here it is:

Concerns about freezing prompt questions

This winter, I’ve found myself remembering something from the book “The Hungry Ocean,” written by commercial fishing-boat captain, Linda Greenlaw, after the movie “The Perfect Storm” came out. Greenlaw, who pilots the sister-ship of the lost Andrea Gail, comments how strange it is to listen to weather reports as they track storms over New England until they “move safely out to sea.”

“People don’t realize that when a storm blows “safely out to sea” it puts boats and their crews in peril,” she says.

I’ve thought of that as I listened to people being interviewed on TV about the 50-, 60and even near 70-degree days we had until just recently. Issues of global warming aside, non-gardeners enjoying dining al fresco in Philadelphia in December were oblivious to the fact that the warm weather they were delighting in could spell trouble for plants later on.

Several readers have emailed me with reports of daffodils and forsythia starting to bloom. “What will happen to the plants when the weather turns cold?” they wanted to know. “What will happen in the spring?”

For the answers, I turned to Bob Keiter, a horticulturalist at Waterloo Gardens. He told me that people with daffodils, hyacinths and even redbud trees in bloom have been calling the nursery with the same questions.

“If it gets too cold,” Keiter said, “obviously it could kill bud tissue that’s more fully developed. If the buds are still fairly tight, there’s less chance of damage. In the low teens or colder, we’ll start to see more damage. It would be better if we had some snow cover. Snow is a great insulator.”

“Worst case,” said Kreiter, “is that emerging buds and even foliage will freeze to death. The plant itself won’t die,” he said. “Mostly what will happen is that there won’t be as good a (floral) ‘show.’”

Lacking snow, gardeners can protect their tender plants by covering them with leaves, straw, or other mulch; where it is appropriate, earth may also be used. For individual small plants, a bucket or overturned flowerpot will work.

Here I realized I was a little confused. I’m used to applying mulch to keep the ground frozen as a means of protecting plants like strawberries and garlic from damage from alternating freezing and thawing. How does mulch help keep plants warm?

Keiter explained that ground heat is always moving upward through the earth. As imperceptible as it is to us, a thick layer of mulch will hold in enough heat to change the climate beneath it.

“But we do need cold,” Keiter added. “Some plants need a dormant period. Otherwise there’s uneven flower development. We see it on azaleas, in particular. There’s sporadic flowering, rather than that big, all-at-once, huge blooming.”