Warm Season Plants
By Gene Gade
Most folks understand the notion that plants take sunlight, air, water and other nutrients and use them to make food, and that it's the food plants produce provides the energy to propel the rest of the living system.
What is less commonly understood is that plants have developed at least two major ways to accomplish this miracle that we call photosythesis: The chemistry is complicated, so for simplicity we call them warm season and cool season plants
As the name suggests, warm season plants require higher soil temperatures before they can start their growth and other life process and they function better at temperatures 15 to 35 degrees warmer than the optimums for cool season plants.
Wyoming is about half way between the tropical regions where the warm season plants developed and the more polar climates where the cool season plants developed and prospered.
As you might expect, on the dry, windy short-grass prairies of Southeast Wyoming
There’s a nice balance of warm and cool season species
Among the warm season species in this grassland are: Blue Grama and buffalo grass
Some of the grasses we grow as crops, such as corn, millet, sorghum and sugar cane are also warm-season species
warm-season plants like this start more slowly in Wyoming, but if temperatures are high and water is available they grow more efficiently than cool season plants.
Thus they are capable of producing more pounds of forage or grain using while consuming less water and fertilizer
The natural mixture of warm and cool season species provides for greater production, no matter whether precipitation comes early or late in the growing season. Its one of the things that makes Wyoming rangelands interesting. I’m Gene Gade for the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension