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Not like the TV weather ever mentions the words "climate change" during these months of extreme weather events here and around the globe, but something in the weather has definitely been changing over the past few years. Living close to the land makes that more obvious.
Plants and animals are getting thrown off their timing so we have had stuff blooming early and other things coming on late. Mostly late. Currently I am noticing that all my alliums (onions, garlic, shallots) are going to flower. The onions & shallots are early, the garlic is late. The garlic should have been ready to harvest last month, but isn't ready yet. Beets and radishes are flowering before making, well, beets and radishes. Lavender usually blooms in June here, and we should have been picking Tayberries then, too, but they are both now just starting to come on. Our Yellow May-blooming waterlilies waited until the end of June, but they may have been delayed by the deeper water level in our pond. The garden sits, suspended, and when the rare warm day comes everything grows like mad only to stop as it cools back down.
Fruit trees that try to bloom at the normal time have not been well pollinated the past few years not, as ordinarily sometimes happened, by late rains, but by freezing snow! At least it appears we will have some fruit this year.
The insect population has been effected - honeybees (who have a lot of environmental burdens these days) are relatively scarce, but so are Yellowjackets, oddly. A nice thing in some ways, but I know there is a corner of the ecological balance that they fill, too. The higher humidity, of course, leads to plenty of mosquitoes. But for mid-July, many other insects seem to be in smaller numbers - and also the birds that feed on them.
I'm curious - what have you noticed?
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