Today is Groundhog’s Day (and Imblog for you Celts!), which is when the natural world starts checking to see if it’s safe to emerge from winter sleep and come out for spring.
But this past winter has been very strange. We usually have our first freeze around Thanksgiving, but this year it was on Halloween. That meant we had even fewer trick-or-treaters than usual. Then we didn’t have another freeze until November closer to our usual first freeze time.
Since then, nothing. No freezes in December or January, which is supposed to be the coldest time of year. On my way to work one morning, listening to the news on the radio, they said San Antonio just had it’s first January with no freezes in “over eight decades.”
I’ve scaled way back on my gardening lately because the baby takes up so much time. When it freezes, I usually cover up my pepper plants with frost blankets, and sometimes I can get them to survive the winter, unless we get a really hard freeze. I got the idea because we have wild peppers here, called chile pequins, that can survive the winter for a few years on their own with no help (sometimes the top dies and then the grow back from the roots). I’ve had pepper plants that have survived 3-5 years with my help, until a really hard freeze finally killed them.
This year I didn’t cover my peppers and decided to let them die just because I felt like I was too busy to try to save them. Well, three of them have survived so far, and one jalapeno plant actually bloomed in January and started making peppers again!
I’m not sure how anyone who gardens could deny climate change. It’s so obvious that things aren’t right. Gardening forces you to pay attention to Nature in ways most modern people don’t. Most people don’t need to pay attention to when it freezes, when it rains, etc. When you’re a gardener, those things are really important, so you know when those things are supposed to happen, and when they don’t happen when they’re supposed to, you notice.
There are gardeners who deny climate change though. I’ve seen them on gardening forums. Hardcore gardening, and by that I mean people who don’t just do it causally, but do things like save their own seeds and try to grow all their own vegetables and so on, tends to attract two types of people. There’s the hippie tree-huggers like me, and then there’s the right-wing libertarian types. The latter types are the ones that insist that climate change is made up by some sort of liberal conspiracy to destroy the economy, or something like that.
But for me, this “nice” weather we’ve been having, with highs in the 70s in January almost every day, just tells me that something is very wrong. My apple trees haven’t even bothered to lose their leaves yet.
We’ll have to adjust, but that’s easier said than done, because climate change isn’t changing things uniformly. It would be easy to say if it’s getting warmer, I can plant tomatoes in February instead of March and that will work. Maybe I can start growing avocados and bananas and they will be fine. But last winter we also had very few freezes, and then we had our hardest freeze in March. That was just about the worst time to have a freeze. We had such warm weather in February that most of the plants started coming out of dormancy and blooming, only to get severely damaged when it went down into the low 20’s in March. That turned out to be our last freeze that year, but it was the most damaging.
Is it time to start asking the Groundhog, “is it safe to plant tomatoes yet?” instead of asking how much longer winter will last?
Rainfall has also become very unpredictable. If we were getting uniformly drier, then we could just start gardening like they do in Tuscon. If it was getting uniformly wetter, then we could say Texas is becoming like Miami, and adjust accordingly. Instead, some years it’s Tuscon, and some years it’s Miami, and sometimes it even starts out being Miami and then suddenly switches to Tuscon, drying out all that lush growth. That’s when you get wildfires.
I also worry about mosquitoes. I always really look forward to our first freeze that finally kills most of the mosquitoes. Without freezes, mosquitoes could be active all year. I really hate it when I want to do things outside, but get swarmed with mosquitoes. Sure, I can use repellent, but that stuff is so oily and uncomfortable. It’s nice when I can go without.
And mosquitoes aren’t just annoying. I was lucky that there wasn’t Zika virus found in Texas last summer while I was pregnant, but it was present the summer before. In mosquito season I can’t step outside for five minutes without being bitten. I don’t want to have to wear repellent just to walk from my house to the car to go to work, to avoid catching the newest mosquito-borne disease.
Maybe it’s time for the Groundhog to start warning us about the climate crisis. Animals use to hibernate and migrate at the right times of year. Plants used to know when they were supposed to go dormant and when they were supposed to bloom. Now everything is confused. Punxsutawney Phil should tell that top hat guy, “Spring? I’m still waiting for winter to start!”
A Heathen Naturalist 