Chill-time

When the fruit and nut trees wake up from winter, they first let their dazzling flowering sexual organs hang out for a few weeks of rampaging intermingling before slowly getting dressed in leaves to fuel their pregnancies with sunlight.  Nothing wrong with that!   Calling in the flying insects to do half the yeoman’s work of dating and mating is a little kinky, but there’s nothing wrong with that, either.  Nature is the most creative and hardest-working sexual machine on the planet.  Adam & Eve dressed in fig leaves were stone dullards by comparison.

I can tell you that the oak trees here on Gullyvornya’s central coast  breathed a sigh of relief after the recent rainstorms.  They looked like dead ducks after another “mild winter,” which more resembled a protracted Indian summer, but now they look refreshed for the time being.  We’re sadly looking at blue skies for the foreseeable future.  It’s getting so you can’t even have polite conversation about the weather with the cash register clerks.  Great weather we’re having!  No, not really.  

“What digby said” about the drought, but let me add that it ain’t just the water that’s a problem.  My understanding is that in autumn the fruit and nut trees synthesize a growth inhibiting hormone that lays them dormant through winter, and cold weather slowly breaks down this growth inhibitor in anticipation of the open-orgy when Spring is sprung.  The trees require a certain number of hours of chill-time (say 300-1500 h below 45 degrees F) in order to properly set their fruit, depending on the species.

In general, drought + short chill-times is not a good combo for happy, proliferative sex between our brothers, sisters, and selfers (Geschwister) in the Kingdom of Humanly Edible Green Things, not to mention their kinky little flying match-makers in our own Less-Sessile Kingdom.