Weird word... What's this all about?

Phenology is one of those subjects which has really stirred my curiosity. The whole concept just makes sense to me. The various cycles of life of all the plants and insects which affect them are determined by the amount of heat they accumulate. These cycles start over each year and have nothing to do with calendar time.

My interest is not so much on the subject in general, but rather in the Phenology of our farm's ecosystem. I think this can provide a real insight into the relationships of all the pieces parts.

Weather, weather all around ...

I realized early on that since this is all based on accumulated heat, I would need accurate local weather data. To me local doesn't mean the regional airport 50 miles away or the local elementary school's 4th grade class's weather station 10 miles away. It means a weather station here on the farm. After a lot of research, checking customer feedback, and saving my pennies for a couple of years, I finally purchased a Vantage Pro 2 station from Davis. Ours is the remote model and works really well. The solar powered data collection part is mounted on a pole at the edge of our Compass Garden. The console is located in our office about 150 yards away. I also purchased the computer software and interface with the data collector gizmo.

This is where it gets a little nerdy...

My computer is collecting weather data every minute and storing it in a file. Although the weather system works great and continually collects data, I couldn't seem to find a way to display it in the format that I wanted. Please don't misunderstand me, the Davis software collects, archives and displays the data. It will plot just about any combination of data you can imagine on a graph, but I couldn;t get it to display the amount of rainfall on a weekly basis. Daily and monthly it does great. But I water plants each week based on the amount of rainfall the previous week.

So...being the somewhat nerdy type, I am in the process of writing a Phenology computer program to archive the weather data into monthly chunks, display it in a more farmer useful format and store data about observed life cycles of our plants and insects. There are Phenology programs available for storing the observations but without the weather data part, life cycle predictions seem very difficult.

The grand plan is to collect the weather data , extract and store on a daily basis both rainfall and the accumulated heat data in terms of degree days. Along with this we try to record observations on life cycle changes, such as, on what day did apple trees break buds, or on what day did we see the first lady bug flying around. In time, by combining the two, I hope we can predict the cycles close enough to help schedule plantings.

I know this whole project sounds like a "poor man's attempt" at a scientific study. If you want to see what a real study into this subject is like check out Phenology pages from these guys. Cool stuff. Now they are serious!!