Growing degree day

Growing degree day is like a special way of counting how warm or hot it is outside. It is important because when certain plants need a certain amount of warmth or heat to grow, we can use this way of counting to figure out when those plants will grow the best.

Imagine that you have a special plant in your garden that needs heat to grow. You want to know the best time to plant it so it will grow well. You need to count how many growing degree days it will take before the plant will start growing properly.

To do this, you would need to check the temperature every day for a certain amount of time. Let’s say you want to check the temperature for 10 days.

Each day, you would take the average temperature of the day, which is the temperature in the morning, afternoon and night added up, and then divided by three.

Let's say the average temperature is 15 degrees Celsius for the first day. If the plant needs a minimum temperature of 10 degrees Celsius to grow, this means that it would have experienced 5 growing degree days for that day (15 - 10 = 5). We add all the growing degree days from all the days you counted and this will help us predict when the plant will grow properly.

So, growing degree day helps us figure out when different plants will grow best and it's like counting how many hot days we need for those plants to grow.