On Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:02:31 +0100, Colin Malsingh
wrote:


There are interesting aspects to this:
(1) If you go as far North as the top of Scotland, you don't actually
get any "night time" for part of the summer (it never actually gets
completely dark). Maybe Edmonton was a bit like this?

No, it's not THAT far north. IIRC, the sun set around 10:30
or 11 pm in summer and rose around 3:30 or 4 am.


(2) I like growing some tropical stuff in my greenhouse and many of
the peppers won't start to flower over summer. They wait until later
on, when the day-length starts to shorten and they think they're back


In the meantime, my Okra are looking good (I've taken at least one
meal's worth off them so far), my Aubergines are all in flower and my
sweet peppers are around the size of tennis balls. And this is in the
South of England!


We've had a disastrously wet spring (northern Pennsylvania -
northeastern USA) and then - in general - a fairly cool
summer. My plants seem to be a bit behind yours.

But where we live - the microclimate in our particular area
does tend towards cool summers: we're in the Appalachian
Mountains. It often gets down into the 40-50 F range at
night in summer here. That's around 4-10 C.

We're building a hoophouse next month, and next year I'm
growing my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants in the
hoophouse.

But what I meant about extremes: we can expect 100 F (38 C)
each summer on a couple of days. We can expect temperatures
in the range of 90-100 F many days in summer (that's 32-38
C).

Last winter, we had -26 F (-32 C) twice (only at night), and
many many days below 0 F (-18 C) - that was the high for the
day, around 0 F.

I don't think that there's anywhere in the UK that has to
contend with these extremes. And there are other areas in
the US more extreme than ours: lots of them.

Pat