By Daryl Bell From The Philadelphia Tribune

In the United States, we are used to having four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Most people think of the Caribbean as being synonymous with year-round summer. They do not think of it as a place that has seasons but it does.

There is the dry season and a wet season. The dry season runs from about February to June. This is the most ideal time on the islands. There’s gorgeous weather with warm sunshine and the occasional tropical rain shower. During the wet season, July to January, there is less sunshine and more rain. Built into the wet season is the hurricane season that starts in June and ends in November.

The Caribbean winter is usually like a perpetual May. Overall, temperatures in the mid-80s prevail throughout most of the region, and trade winds make for comfortable days and nights, even without air conditioning.

According to one vacation website, different islands get different amounts of rain. For islands such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Dominican Republic, Dominica and northeast Jamaica, winter is usually the driest season but even so the mountains are wet and they still experience brief showers in the afternoon. On other islands, you can have overcast skies during an entire vacation.

The planting season in the Caribbean is the end of the dry season.

An article done by Karla LeFevre in 2011 follows the research of Donovan Campbell, a geographer from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Campbell relocated from Kingston to St. Elizabeth in 2007 to work with farmers so that he could study the effects of the weather pattern on farming conditions. He concentrated on the small rural farmers who cultivate 3 or less acres and sold their produce locally.

These farms are in danger of disappearing because of the changes in the weather pattern, changes that have been gradual but are now becoming more prevalent and permanent. Droughts have caused water irrigation costs and supply costs to increase over the last couple of years.

What Donovan found is that in June, the mid-summer drought arrives and causes vegetation such as scallions and watermelons to wilt and deflate. To combat the dry conditions the farmers use jars and buckets to deliver water to hydrate the dying plants. They spread dry guinea grass over the field to try to retain the moisture.

Over the years, the farmers have seen this becoming a pattern rather than just an exception so they have been forced to come up with methods to combat the shortening of the growing season.

In interviewing the farmers, Campbell also learned that they developed a crop schedule based on tracking of conditions over many decades. They found that there are two dry seasons: one in July and the other from December to March. The other months are considered prime growing seasons.

They plant crops that are identified as quick growing from April through June. These are the biggest income producing crops and it helps to supplement the smaller crops that are harvested from the August through November planting. This final cash crop season is right during the hurricane season so what they reap at the end of the season can be a hit or miss situation.

As for the wet season when the rains and the hurricanes come, it is a different type of devastation that is much harder to overcome. There is usually widespread flooding, which causes all kinds of problems for residents (look at Haiti right now for example), very similar to the footage that was recently shown on the news of North Carolina and various areas of Texas with the exception of the flattened shanty towns.

I will never forget the day my schoolmates and I were stuck at our high school. I doubt if anyone nowadays would imagine spending the night at school because of flood conditions?

Fortunately this was an old boarding school, so the old beds and sheets were still stored and packed away. There were approximately 25 students including myself who were stranded. The report was that most of the roads were flooded so our bus driver decided not to take any chances therefore there were no alternatives we had to sleep at school.

Fortunately, the principal’s residence was on the school campus. He swung into action and made sure that we were safe and fed. A few days later when the waters receded, students were sent home to reunite with their families. It was an adventure we would never forget.

The whole point is, whether you live in the Caribbean or in the United States, Mother Nature is in charge. Ultimately, we have to be smart and learn how to survive regardless of what direction the weather pattern decides to take. We definitely have to take global warming more seriously.

For more on this story go to: http://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/in-the-caribbean-the-seasons-pared-down-to/article_4c68d50f-c67a-520a-9a56-38415644a1b4.html

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