Implications of Base Temperature In the November 2010 issue, I
discussed the fundamentals of how temperature influences the
development and timing of greenhouse crops. Conceptually,
floriculture crops respond to temperature similarly: they
develop in response to the average daily temperature, and they
have minimum, optimum and maximum temperatures. However, the
values of these minimum, optimum and maximum temperatures vary
from one crop to another. The base temperature (or minimum
temperature) is the cool temperature at which a plant does not
develop. At or below the base temperature, plants no longer
develop leaves and progress towards flowering ceases. As
temperature increases above the base temperature, plants develop
progressively faster. The base temperature value of a crop can
be experimentally estimated by growing plants at a range of
temperatures, recording time to flowering (or some other
developmental event), then extrapolating from the data the
temperature at which time to flower is infinity. In th