Gardening (& Farming) with temperature swings

One of the challenges of gardening in southern Alberta are big changes in the temperature. We regularly get Chinook winds from the mountains that can raise the temperatures significantly for a few hours to a few days. Below is a graph from the past three weeks. We had a warm period at the end of January and we are now at the beginning of new warm period

If the forecast is right we’re not even close to how warm its going to get this week. This is a screenshot from The Weather Network app:

Note that we’re not even freezing at most nights. From the warm temperatures of the end of January one of my perennials started to come out of the ground. (I call it lambs ear but I’m not sure that’s it.)

So far I haven’t seen any buds breaking on trees but if the temperature forecast holds there may be some. One thing you notice in southern Alberta is that there aren’t a lot of trees. They don’t naturally grow here so any that are here are from human plantings. The other thing you notice is that there aren’t many large ones. Tree’s need to be very hardy to last in this environment.

On the farm the concern is that the winter wheat will start to grow soon. If you’re not familiar with it it is a crop that we plant in the fall and let it grow for a month or so before winter sets in. It vernalizes and sits dormant over the winter until the spring. It’s likely part of the dormancy has been broken now so as long as we don’t get extremely cold temperatures it should be fine.