We would find a couple lines of thought in that AEA podcast with Joe Ailts about the measured and contextualized interest of sowing early. We could rephrase that for our GTS circles : to breed for cold soild emergence.
You’ll see that it’s with broadacre crops in North Western Wisconsin, in particular soy, beans and corn, but the guy is also a passionate pumpkin grower, so there’s a couple of interesting nuggets in there. A bit tangential but noteworthy.
On the subject of sowing earlier to get higher yields and better drought resistance, I also just want link my first post on that : Thomas cucurbits' garden summer 2025 (+ some solanaceae!) - #11 by ThomasPicard
The idea came out looking at volunteers which TOLD me that the rule of thumb (in my local, western France) that “you should never direct sow or transplant cucurbits before mid-May” was 100% outdated, and that we would find leverage in sowing earlier : so to say synchronizing our sowings with when the soil is really biologically active. Before it runs dry, before earthworms go hiding. Again : I got a sandy soil, not holding water, so that’s relevant to this type of situation! You can see on pics that in June everything seemed already dry, so before this year’s huge summer drought, with crazy high temps on top!
I’ll just add to that post that after the summer season the very small volunteer watermelon seen on pic had vines nearly 2 times longer than all the - culled and selected for early vigor - direct sown: 4meters in total vs. average 2.3meters. This was telling too, as the little original advance seemed to go exponentially afterwards… But of course we should take that with a grain of salt as it would need to be confirmed in a bigger experience, assessing crop development, yields, etc.
Regarding Joe Aits and his sowing timings and temps I looked on weatherspark.com (my personnal comparison) and that confirmed that his “end of April temps” were quite similar to mine, probably ten days later. I recommend this website to make clever assesments of similarities and differences between our different climates.