If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one tells quite a story. You don’t have to look that closely to see parts of northern Canada (northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and northern Quebec) are considerably warmer than other parts of southern Canada, including the Great Lakes region; and even warmer or as warm as parts of the U.S. as far south as the southern states.

Right here, in my little corner of the continent on the Bruce Peninsula, Ontario, Canada, where the Jet Stream now often hangs out, the unusual cold, wet weather persists. Cool-crop seeds I planted in the ground weeks ago are barely up, or still waiting patiently for a few more degrees of heat and sun.

Maybe by the end of this week, I tell the snow peas, potatoes, Swiss chard, beets, and even kale, the hardiest of them all. Normally, by mid to late May the garden is well greened up. It was, even last spring, which was bad enough as late springs go. But this is something else. My old memory is far from perfect, but I don’t recall anything like this spring: temperatures barely in the double-digit Celsius, often cold enough to threaten frost, and more cloudy, rainy days than sunny.

The garden, Hope Ness, May 20, 2019

On the bright side it could be a lot worse: parts of southern Ontario, the Ottawa valley, Quebec and New Brunswick are still flooded, or just beginning to recover from disastrous floods.

And there is some hope on the horizon for the mid-Ontario growing season toward the end of this week, with a forecast of warmer weather and some sunny days. That’s if the forecast pans out. No offence to the climatologist/forecasters. They do their best; but in recent years it’s become evident that the weather in increasingly hard to predict. Which doesn’t make life any easier for market gardeners and other farmers whose livelihood depends on dependable weather.

May 24, 2016, potatoes and peas well-sprouted

Are those days gone, or in the process of going? I can’t help but wonder. Even as I sit here at my keyboard typing out these words and concerns, tender plants I risked putting in the cold frame yesterday to “harden’ before transplanting in the garden, are still under a protective tarp cover. With the temperature hovering around 6 degrees Celsius, and a cold wind gusting from the north, tender plants like tomatoes, squash and peppers are vulnerable to shock damage, or worse.

By this time in past seasons I would be thinking about planting some bush-bean seeds, or even sweet corn. But sufficient soil temperature is critical for germination when you plant untreated seed (without chemical fungicide) as I do. And that temperature, a minimum of 21 degrees Celsius, is nowhere near being reached yet. I’ll be luck to get those seeds in the ground by the first week of June. I hate being pessimistic — honest, I do — but I’ve even beginning to wonder if the soil is ever going to heat up enough in time to save the corn season.

And so it goes. I trust these unscientific, anecdotal observations and thoughts from an old gardener’s experience, and perhaps others like me, should be worth something. After all,  in a part of the world where most people have little understanding of where their food comes from, let alone how it grows, the voices of those who do should be heard.

I count myself as one of those who believes, for good reason, that climate change is a critical issue affecting the future of life on earth as we know it. Surely, I daresay, it can’t be denied any longer. And yet, backward-thinking, Trumpian and mini-Trumpian politicians who pander to populist, climate-change denial are increasingly being elected to be our so-called leaders. Even in Canada, eh.

It’s unprincipled political opportunism at its worst, ‘the will to power’ for its own sake, rather than any thoughtful, informed, caring concern about this precious little jewel of a planet and the present and future generations that live, and hopefully will live, on it.

They should know better. And they do, which makes it all the more tragic.