In November 2017, I presented two talks about the challenges of growing food in the increasingly wetter and hotter climate of Southeast Texas. The first was to the Montgomery County Master Gardeners at Texas Agri-Life in Conroe, TX. It dealt with practical steps you can take to adjust your plant lists and planting schedule to the reality of temperatures this year where you live.
The second was for the Houston chapter of 350.org, the Pantsuit Republic, and Rice University Student Climate Club, and dealt with the alarming problems raised by ever increasing temperatures and their effect on anyone’s ability across the planet to grow food plants. It also dealt with seeming lack of awareness in the climate activists’ networks, agricultural universities,and possible solutions.
This second talk at Rice University is now a pdf can be downloaded at the link below.
Click to access climate-food-350-org-2017.pdf
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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.
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