Jacob, Planting by the signs is sort of how I grew up. We knew to watch Mother Nature for certain signs, and when we saw them, we knew it was okay to plant. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was learning about gardening from my dad and from various neighbors who gardened, we didn't have elaborate lists of what things to plant on which dates....we just knew from the signs that Mother Nature gave us that it was time to plant. So, yes, phenology worked.....back then. Along the way the last couple of decades though, things have changed. Our climate has become increasingly erratic in the 2000s. I first noticed it around 2003, and everything has been going downhill ever since.

We started getting hotter winter weather. At first it wasn't that the whole winter was obviously warmer, it was just warm spells. After 4 or 5 winters in a row with the meteorologists saying "this is our warmest winter ever....", I started wondering if winter ever would feel like winter again. The fruit trees began blooming earlier and earlier and we began losing the fruit crops to late freezes more often than before. I'm about to give up on growing stone fruit here because the weather is making it impossible.

We had a real winter in 2010 and I was excited about that. I thought it meant our weather was returning to normal. Nope. Now, when I look back at it, I wonder if that was our last real winter....you know, a normal winter with ice and snow and prolonged cold weather that went on for months. Nowadays, it seems like we get a brief bit of cold weather in December and about a week of it in January and then our winter is, in essence, over. Trees leaf out earlier, perennial flowers bloom earlier, the wildlife (especially snakes) wake up earlier. In what world is it normal for venomous snakes to be up and out moving in Oklahoma in January and February? It used to be that we got a reprieve from the snakes until about April, and often fairly late in April, but that's not happening any more. In what world is it normal to have chicks hatching in February? We cannot count on all the natural processes of phenology to guide us any more because they all are out of whack. Birds are migrating at different times. Insects like craneflies and June bugs, whose arrival used to occur fairly consistently at the same time, more or less, every year now sometimes appear months earlier than before. It is maddening.

So, how do you cope in a world with a changing climate? How do you adapt when phenology isn't working for you the way it once did? I have done this by focusing on soil temperatures. Because we know the soil temperatures at which different seeds will germinate and at which plant growth occurs, I just track my soil temperatures now and plant when they are in the right range. I don't worry much about the calendar or phenology. I plant when the soil tells me it is time to plant (nothwithstanding the fact that I still have to work around air temperatures and rainfall and such). I watch what the weather is doing, and if we are getting hot early, I get busy and race to get the plants in the ground as early as I can in order to beat the inevitable heat that shuts down production on tomatoes, beans and such here in our climate. Did it make any sense that I was rushing tomato and bush bean plants into the ground in March? Perhaps not if a person was focused on what our weather used to be like, but I have to deal with the weather we have now. Those insanely early bean plantings gave us a bean harvest in May that was incredible and which did, thankfully, beat the heat, although just barely. We were harvesting our first tomatoes in late April, when a lot of Oklahoma gardeners who were waiting for the weather to stabilize still didn't even have tomato plants in the ground yet. I don't say that to gloat---I say it to point out that in an increasingly erratic climate, we have to change our practices to continue to get good harvests. Being as far south as I am means that the window of opportunity to get good cool-season crops to produce in Spring is becoming a really narrow window. It seems like the heat arrives so early any more that the only really reliable cool-season crops are potatoes and onions. Even the asparagus tends to wake up much earlier than it once did. Just 8 or 10 years ago, the asparagus really didn't start putting up spears until March, and sometimes late March. Usually, about the time the asparagus spears began to appear, I was planting tomatoes. Now? For the last couple of years, especially in 2016 and 2017, the asparagus spears were popping up out of the ground in January. January! Think about that! This year it was a bit later, but not much.

So, for me, pheonology has slowly fallen by the wayside because it isn't reliable any more. Maybe it never will be again. I always refer new gardeners to the OSU Fact Sheets that list planting dates because you cannot teach phenology or soil temperatures to new gardeners their first couple of years. They have to just learn the basics first, and then they can focus on phenology to whatever extent it still applies or they can begin to learn what works with the weather they have in their specific location. For me, though, soil temperatures and floating row covers have allowed me to find ways to continue gardening successfully in an increasingly erratic climate. Maybe in some zones in some areas, phenology still works in terms of letting the natural signs show you when to plant, but here where I am, midway between Dallas and OKC, I don't find it as reliable as it once was.

Dawn