zoned out
I have been reading a bit about hardiness zones today. I hadn't really come across them before as they are a US thing, created originally by the USDA, but I had seen reference to them recently on quite a few American garden/allotment bloggers on Blotanical, often in people's 'about me' section of their blogs.
So I decided to look it up. This article at Wikipedia is quite informative, it seems zones can help you work out what plants you can grow, and I found out I am in Zone 8, which puts me on a par with Washinton or Seattle. This of course only relates to minimum temperatures though, and doesn't relate to days of sunshine, length of days, dates of last frost etc so in rather variable and northern Great Britain it may not be so great a guide. It seems that although in hardiness Zone 8 we are in Heat Zone 1 or 2 which means only a handful of days a year over 30°C.
And according to very helpful feature at Garden Action, which alters the timing advice in their articles to use your own location settings, my last frost date is early May and my first frost date is mid October, so there ain't that much outdoor growing time for tender plants!
The RHS Hardiness guide is also useful in the UK, this puts plants into categories of how hardy they are; in their plant selector you can select how hardy you want a plant to be and what kind of situation it will be in and they will suggest things.
Most of this is stuff I knew about but it was good to take a few minutes to go over it again and take it all in. I'm certainly glad we have the greenhouse and leanhouse™ as it extends our season so much. For instance although it is cold, frosty, going dark at about 6pm and occasionally snowy here we had our first salad of the year the other day. It is just about warm enough in the the greenhouse that the rainbow chard has started to grow a decent size of leaf to eat!
6 comments:
Loads of very interesting links there - will keep me busy on my lunch break today :)
Beware of predictions for late and first frost dates though! This year, our first frost was mid september and I have learnt the hard way that you should always be prepared with lots of fleeces and cloches and cover everything as soon as the temperature drops! Better be safe than sorry they say and how sorry was I ...
Yeah, that late September one last year took all my squashes out just as they had flowered.
We had (a non-gardening) someone looking after our plot at the time and she was dreading us coming back - she thought something she had done wrong had turned all the leaves black and floppy! She was most relieved that it was just a frost.
I've often wondered about these zones..I've seen many bloggers who say they live in zone...4,5,6 and not really known what they mean. The thing I've noticed about the USA is that even though a particular climate (like Seattle) might closely mirror our own here in the UK, they have much stronger light levels because they are at a different lattitude. We are artificially warmer than we should be because of the gulf stream.
I think the light levels and day lengths are probably more influential than the temperature etc. We're right on the edge of the 'good' growability zone in the UK; I believe maize won't grow successfully in Scotland... or even as far north as Durham, whereas it works fine in the south.
I am impressed with you salad leaves. I pick mine at baby stage for salads and get many crops.
Hello
I've just found you through Blotanical.
I too thought the Zones were something which only applied in the USA.
I'll look mine up now - not that I take much notice of what is,or isn't, supposed to grow in our garden.
I quite like the hit-and-miss-iveness of doing what I like.
(That applies to climate though . . . not to soil type . . . I do pay attention to that!)
Esther Montgomery
ESTHER IN THE GARDEN
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