SARASOTA - It's been a mild winter on this Suncoast this year, with daily highs well above average -- sometimes in the 80's for several days in a row. For many people, that means heading to the beach or the pool. For plants and bugs, it means starting Spring a little earlier.
The sounds of springtime fill the air, with the trees in bloom and the butterflies happily searching for a place to lay their eggs. Except this is not a normal scenario, as it's still winter on the Suncoast.
Daytime highs on many days lately are above average, sometimes climbing past the 80 degree mark and warming the soil at a faster pace.
“We begin to see a lot more germination than we would typically have in a typical year, and what we're finding is that it just starts Spring about 3 weeks earlier than what we would expect,” says Laurel Chiller, co-owner of Plants Nursery.
But with the beauty of tree buds and flowers blossoming early comes added effort for nursery owners, where one of the downsides about having a milder winter means extra work for them, such as putting away the greenhouses when they’ve barely used them at all. “Here we are, we had only just a couple nights of 26 degree weather out here, so right now we're fighting heat in the greenhouses rather than cold nights.”
And all this also means an increased amount of bugs. “Because of their respiratory system, when it's colder, they just actively they slow down. So the warmer the weather, the better the activity is,” says David Pomford of Fahey Pest Management.
That creates a spike in business in areas such as pest control. “The earlier in the year we get started, the better it is for our industry. But it's good for the customers. Now they find these things out before some of our seasonal residents head home and we can take care of those problems before they get back.
Just this month alone the area has seen 16 out of the 19 days with temperatures 75 degrees or above.
And we are still lagging behind in rainfall for the month and the year, corresponding with a La Nina weather pattern, which typically brings drought conditions to the Southeast. If we don't start to get some rainfall in the next several weeks, we could be in trouble heading into brush fire season.
