Growing for extreme temperature swing tolerance

Very good point about the short-season plants. Such a good point that I’ve started a spinoff thread about that topic specifically!

I can see advantages to both short-season plants and long-lived perennials when it comes to extreme weather swings. The ones that finish their life cycle quickly are likely to be able to dodge extreme weather events entirely, especially if they can self-sow. Then the lucky seeds will get a long enough stretch of favorable weather, and add new seeds to the soil. The unlucky ones will die, but that won’t matter if there are enough lucky ones to that happen to live.

Even though the only difference may start out as luck, it’s likely epigenetic change would eventually start adapting those crops quickly to be able to survive because of their genes, and not just because they happened to be lucky and germinate right before the only stretch of mild weather available.

With very long-lived perennials, it’s likely they have survived a lot of different types of extreme weather at some point in their lives, so they know how to deal with each kind. They may or may not like getting one extreme that swings to the opposite immediately, but knowing how to deal with each separately would probably translate to more resilience about dealing with them clustered closely.

So it’s an interesting question about whether it’s the in-between species that are going to start dying off. Anything that is used to long stretches of favorable weather that has no genes for adaptability to anything unfavorable may be in very deep trouble.

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