This post is by Lizzie.
There's another media hit that I missed.I consulted Why are daffodils blooming now in January?. If I could have answered, I would have said something like:
(1) Vancouver has an odd combination of coolness and mildness for a warm place, so plants may be accumulating cold (before plants are able to respond to warmer temperatures). , you need cool winter temperatures, but they're just cold (for example, 2-6 degrees Celsius seems to be the sweet spot). It means starting to grow.
This is especially true for plants that come from other places that likely haven't evolved for Vancouver's climate, such as daffodils.
(2) It's getting a lot warmer! I guess it's blooming now that it's warmer.
Deep insight, I know…. They missed me, but luckily I got my colleague Doug Justice to talk to me, and he got my point right. Doug knows more about plants than I do. He also calls us our cherry timing…
International cherry prediction contest
That will happen again this year!
Better compete! why? You can earn money and help build better models. Because here are the things I don't want to say on TV.
We all talk about „chilling“ and „forcing“ plants, but what we don't tell you is that we've never actually measured the physiological transition between cooling and forcing. . Because…I don't know what it is. Almost all cooling forcing models are built on scant data that some peaches (almost) never bloomed when planted in warmer locations more than 50 years ago. I need your help!