Daylight Savings Time

Here I sit, 8:00 PM on this first day of daylight savings time, and it is still quite light outside.

This daylight savings time is going to take some getting used to. I’ve been programmed to come home from work and rush around to finish any gardening chores that I decide need to be done, often holding off dinner until dusk or later. Now, I can come home from work, eat, and still have oodles of time to work around in the garden, or just sit and watch the sunset. I can remember when we were growing up, we did observe daylight savings time, but it ended at some point in the 70’s. My best guess is that it ended after 1972, when an amendment to the Uniform Time Act of 1966 “extended the option not to observe DST to areas lying in separate time zones but contained within the same state.” Indiana obviously exercised that option sometime shortly after 1972.

So, what does this mean for the plants? Do four o’clocks become five o’clocks? By the way, four o’clocks (Mirabilis jalapa) are very easy plants to grow. In Zone 5, we treat them as annuals, but they self-sow reliably, so once you plant them, you’ll have some every year. You can also harvest the seeds, which are fairly large and black, and easy to keep. Further south, these are grown as perennials. They can withstand pretty much any conditions. Mine grow on the east side of the house, near a dryer vent. I virtually ignore them most of the time, except when they are blooming!

And what about daylilies? Do they have to put in extra duty to keep blooming an extra hour for us? There is a daylily nursery near here. Maybe I’ll stop in and ask them how they plan to adapt, and adapt their plants, to daylight savings time.

Oh, wait, I get it, the plants don’t know time, so they will still just do their thing, and it will be ME who has to do all the adjusting!