It’s been a warm first couple months of 2010 in Western Oregon, no question. You might be surprised just how warm. Here’s some information from Robin Rosetta that puts it into perspective:
With our warm spring, you might want to consider using degree days (heat unit accumulation) to monitor the phenological status of your crops and pests. There is a great website at the Integrated Plant Protection Center at OSU that can help with that. I just checked on degree days here at NWREC. With a base threshold of 41 degrees F, we’re at 282 degree days as of 2/16/2010 in Aurora. We didn’t hit that until March 31 in 2009. We almost a month ahead of last year. There are lots of utilities at this Web site: http://uspest.org/wea/. More specifically, you can check on locations near you and use your own thresholds at this OSU IPPC Web site: http://uspest.org/cgi-bin/ddmodel.pl?spp=aaa.
