Lately, I have been reading my gardening books and combing the internet trying to get information on how different vegetables do at different temperatures. For example, given that all sites in Southeast Texas just busted all time hottest month data, should we really be planting tomato plants, carrots, beets, snap beans as the schedule says?
Briefly the answer would seem to be “yes.” Mostly they all sprout in high temperature soil (mine was 83˚F 1 inch down the other morning before the sun got on it) in what is now the carrot bed. They don’t sprout as well or as quickly though so will need plenty of scarce water.
Another question though is will they grow in that temperature of soil, and in the air temperatures after they come up? After a lot of searching I have developed a huge table of vegetables and temperatures that I will put in the next edition along with planting by temperature guidelines as the months increasingly become hard to predict.
What is shocking though is that the data I have assembled seems to not be systematically available anywhere on the web, and virtually all the agricultural extensions just tell people to follow the local planting calendar “based on years of study” the Missouri guidelines say. This is another way of saying that no one is ready for the directions that climate change is headed.
