This has been a weird winter. I think you could say without too much doubt in your voice that as the years go by, the weather continues to become more volatile and less predictable. Going from 50s Fahrenheit to well below zero a matter of days is not something a lot of plants are prepared to tolerate.
Yesterday while on a walk I saw a patch of chickweed, a little dead nettle, dock, ground ivy, virginia waterleaf, and some other weedy plants:
These are plants of spring. They are growing on an east-facing slope beside the walking path, with many trees on the other side. So they do have some natural protection. But I see this pattern everywhere this year - - plants that would normally have died by now have either hung on, or germinated and grown in winter.
Maybe it’s no more than usual - - maybe I’m just looking for it. But I got to thinking - - could I have planted cilantro after our big cold spell in December?
The thing that potentially takes this idle musing from opportunism nearer to necessity is the sobering understanding that we now live in a world where the temperature can drop 70 degrees in a matter of days, and even if we get a much needed handle on drawdown it’s unclear if this trend will change. And I don’t imagine that the primary growing season is or will remain exempt from these swings. Increased exposure to vectors for total crop failure is not a good thing for farmers in our fragile food system.
We know (or I’ll scale that back and wait for the citations - - I’ve heard) that exposure to certain stressful conditions as seedlings, like drought, can make the resulting plants more resilient in the face of that stress later in life. It seems reasonable to me to think that some aspect of that tolerance, or of the innate resilience that allowed the plant to go through the stress and throw its epigenetic switch without succumbing, might be heritable.
Perhaps we should all be casting extra seed out in the winter to see what takes?
Wild plants like the one in the photo above seem to me to be the most likely to adapt to these swings without any interference from us. I wonder, as we become aware of the wild plants untroubled by these swings, if there is even greater opportunity than usual in bringing genes over from them to related domestics.
. You probably already thought of this, but let me catch up - - that also means you’ll have plants of the same type at different lifecycle stages during stressful weather, potentially giving a greater chance of young plants receiving non-lethal and epigenetically significant stresses.