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!
