Garden Patience.
* Take readings on three straight mornings at 1 to 2 inches for seeds and 4 to 6 inches for transplants. Planting too early, before the soil has had time to warm up, can lead to seed rot, slow germination, poor growth and disease. For example, cucumber seeds usually take less than a week to germinate in a soil of 70 degrees Fahrenheit. They could take two weeks in 60-degree soil. Tomato transplants need a soil above 60 degrees to grow. And setting out pepper plants before the soil is 70 degrees could stunt their growth for the entire growing season. You can buy a soil thermometer at a local nursery or hardware store. Or order one from a gardening catalog. This table provides a good general guide for minimum soil temperatures for seeds and transplants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, snap beans 60º F Sweet corn, lima beans, mustard greens 65º F Spring Patience: Minimum Soil Temperatures for Planting *
Okra, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes 75º F Peppers, watermelons, squash, southern peas 70º F Your calendar and a soil thermometer will help you know the proper planting time for your garden vegetables. Many of the vegetables we plant are from the tropics. They don’t like cold soils and won’t grow well in them. To get the best growth, then, plant all transplants and seeds within a certain soil-temperature range. 
Global Trends Indicate a Coal Comeback Is Unlikely FacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailPrint分享Financial Times:President Donald Trump has pledged to “put our miners back to work” in the US, promising to return high-paying jobs to rundown rural areas of states such as Pennsylvania that brought him victory in last year’s election. Trends in coal markets, both in the US and internationally, suggest that will be an uphill battle.In 2013, the US Energy Information Administration projected that world coal demand would rise 39 per cent by 2040. Now it is expecting growth of just 1 per cent. If not quite “Peak Coal”, it certainly looks like an extended plateau. Projections of energy demand even a few years into the future can never be relied on: there are too many uncertainties in how markets and technology will evolve, and the EIA itself makes clear that this scenario is just one among many possible outcomes. Even so, the latest projection, from the EIA International Energy Outlook 2017, published last week, shows that the promise of eternally rising world demand for coal, which was the consensus expectation just a few years ago, can no longer be taken for granted.China dominates world coal markets, accounting for more than half of total global demand. The EIA believes that Chinese coal consumption may now be on a declining trend, with industrial use for steam and steelmaking already having peaked, and demand for power generation likely to peak around 2023. With demand also in long-term decline in the US and in Europe, growth in some emerging economies, led by India, is not enough to raise total coal use overall.More: ($) The future of coal in seven charts