the.com/growing season
The calendar's only honest promise: light and warmth, on loan, briefly.
means The stretch of the year warm and light enough for plants to sprout, develop, and mature before frost shuts the whole operation down.
from A plain compound, not a borrowing — 'growing' from Old English grōwan (to flourish, to spring up, akin to 'grass' and 'green') plus 'season' from Old French seson, tracing back to Latin serere, 'to sow.' So buried in the phrase is a small redundancy: 'season' already meant the sowing-time, and 'growing' just says it again, louder, for farmers who needed no ambiguity about when the clock was running.
- defined by
- last spring frost to first fall frost
- range
- 365 days in tropics, under 100 near poles
- shrinking myth
- actually lengthening globally as climate warms
- farmer's math
- every week shorter can mean a failed crop