Recent Posts
-
Admin
Mar
24
Climate Zones
March 24, 2007 | 8 Comments
Our Garden Goddess. We’ve named her Lajwanti.
This week we started our outdoor planting. The first thing that you need to do is to figure out your climate zone. The common terms that you will encounter are Hardiness Zone, Heat Zone, and Sunset Zone. Apologies to our readers outside the US and Canada, as most of the links below will be useless to you. Do talk to people at your local nursery or find information at your local library.
Hardiness Zone
Typically the hardiness zone refers to low temperature ranges in the region. We are in zone 6a. What does this mean for us?? A low temperature range of between -10 and -5 F (or -23.3 to -20.6 C). You can find your zone here.
If you live in the land to the north of us (fondly called a land with three winters and one fall by J) you can get your hardiness map here – the hardiness zone pretty much defines the length of the growing season.
Sunset Zone
However, it is not sufficient to just know your hardiness zone. Average rainfall, soil conditions, latitude, max temperatures, relative humidity, wind, and heat also weigh in heavily.
All these factors are considered in the development of the sunset zone map which you can find here.
Heat Zone
The heat zone map provides a guidance on the number of days when the temperature goes above 86 F (30 C). You can download the map here.
All of this is well and good, but does not give a clue of what to plant. Fortunately we found an excellent resource which is located in another state but has very similar if not identical climate and soil conditions as ours. Though this would not guarantee success for us, at least we have a wealth of experience to lean on. Hope you can find similar experts from your zones.
For most vegetables, the recommended planting is generally after the last frost of the season. This date of course will vary from zone to zone. But that should be of no worry now since you should have figured that out by now. Next up is a handy dandy Vegetable Planting Calendar. This calendar will help you ascertain when to plant seeds, transplant, and harvest.
Ofcourse, to get the max out of your garden, a bit of planning will go a long way. I think we’ll be doing some post mortem this season (aka we’ll kill some plants) because we didn’t plan right. For example, we went and got cauliflower saplings and then we find out that cauliflower is a delicate darling in our zone because it cannot take temperatures outside of 50-70 F while it has a maturity time of 65 days. This makes it very difficult to fit into our growing season, and it will be close to a miracle if we get some yield.
Another one is Brussels sprouts – looks like if it catches a “clubroot infestation”, the patch becomes unusable for a decade. This could happen if we plant brussel sprouts in the same patch more than once in four years. If we had visited our (now) favorite site earlier, we may not have decided on cauliflower and brussel sprouts.
In short,
1. Ascertain your Hardiness, Sunset and Heat Zones.
2. Get resources from your local library, nursery, university, your local co-operative extension office or the Internet about your specific zone.
3. If you have started seeds indoors, make sure you transplant the seedlings at the right time of year to your garden patch. (For instance, spinach likes cool weather and waiting for summer may not be a good idea. Tomatoes like hot weather, and subjecting them to frost will kill them.).
4. Read about the performance, care and requirements of different vegetables and fruits in your zone before planting saplings or seeds.
Well, we are off and running. This weekend we plan to almost double the size of our veggie garden. Will keep you posted on our progress.
Filed Under: climate-zone-heat-zone, GARDENING, grow-vegetables, hardiness-zone, sunset-zone
|
8 Comments
i couldn’t read past “lajwanti” co i was laughing so hard
)
Very informative post.
And Lajwanti is cool
.
Wow! Lajo is gorgeous. Your yard is already so green!
I don’t think I can dare to plant anything outside just yet. We got our first hailstorm yesterday. I need to clear out my garage and move my car in. Hail can make big dents in the car! It’s still raining and that totally messed up my plans to spend time in the yard clearing it up. We are likely to get see some snow and lots more hail.
Some of my okra has germinated as have some rudbeckia. I am so excited! I hope I don’t kill them before I plant them outside.
Lajwanti is gorgeous! What a wonderfully informative post! Although I love to spend time in the garden I am not always successful. But I do not give up easily and hope one day I will be able to reap the fruits and vegies from my garden too!
tx all. you should know by now who came up with the name lajwanti !
Manisha – pic is from last spring.
For some reason local nurseries dont seem to be carrying okra seeds. We want some, and one nursery will have saplings in mid april. Most of our other seeds have germinated – more on that next week.
–Jai
I can send you okra seeds. Lowe’s has several varieties, including an organic brand. Let me know!
thanks, manisha. we’ll check at lowe’s. our nursery has promised to get saplings in a few weeks. – bee
If you change your mind, let me know.
You’d mentioned elsewhere that you are in the high desert plains where it is very dry. Your grass is very lush and green! Did you use buffalo or blue gramma grass or any of the xeric varieties? If you did, was that your first choice or did you have to switch.
I have Kentucky Blue and it’s very needy when it comes to water. In Chicagoland, our lawns were never watered and they were a lush green. In Colorado, it’s an effort through summer to keep a balance between a green lawn and water usage. I looked into resodding with a xeric variety but it’s jjust too expensive to get it done and too labor intensive for me to do it. So I am letting the local wild fescue take over my lawn instead.
My other reason for looking into new sod was dandelions. At one time the green in my lawn was more from dandelions than from blades of grass. I got at them with a vengeance last year but I was rather late as it was well into summer when I realized I didn’t have a lawn. I am attacking them as they come up this spring – yanking them out at every opportunity. What do you do for dandelions or do you not have that problem?
we have kentucky blue. needs a lot of watering in summer. we fertilise once a month, and use weed killer for grass about thrice a year. in summer, if we see dying grass or bald patches, we put new sod there, and we reseed once or twice a year. just generally put seeds everywhere. it’s ridiculous to grow grass in desert plains. it’s not suited for this part of the world. we have 1/3 stones/pebbles, and 2/3 grass. still it is work. we do have fewer weeds than our neighbours, and that has to do with fertilising the grass and keeping it strong, i guess. we go to a local nursery and get our grass fertiliser and seed from there. they have a better idea of lawn care and their products are better suited for local soils. do you have bill bugs? they kill grass (you’ll have lots of grassy looking yellow patches) and weeds soon take its place. do find out. if that’s the case, you need to put something once a year to keep them away all year long. we didn’t realise why some of our grass was yellow no matter what we did. then we found out about these critters.
got tired of yanking out dandees. get one of those pump spray cans, put weed killer for lawns in it, and target the dandees when you see them. may need more than one application.
this weekend we’re gonna put high nitrogen fertiliser (28-3-3) even though our sprinklers come on only in may. it helps the lawn.
- bee
I don’t have much of a yard. But whatever little I have is more than enough! My husband wanted to switch to a rock garden in the front but grass is very good for the environment. Apart from the amount of oxygen it generates, it also reduces the level of dust in the air and helps humidity in the dry summers.
Everyone is very environment and health conscious here. So chemicals are generally frowned upon and also, the kids run from yard to yard. My next-door neighbor insists that those fertilizers give you all kinds of diseases. But after a while yanking dandelions out just got too much and there were only holes and hardly any lawn left!So I used weed killer plus turf builder thingee in combination with the weed-be-gone spray and brought it under control to some extent. If anyone had complained, I would have handed them those dandelion claws and told them to green the lawn as well! We fertilize, too, but were told to do it only about 4-5 times a year. I think we did it at most 3 times.
I found an organic fertilizer made from chicken poo that I will use this year. It has no weed killer and really smells. I was going to do my first spot of fertilizing and weed killing last weekend but it poured and has been sprinkling every now and then.
So far no bugs or ants.
I want to start replacing my grass with blue gramma. I might start this summer in small sections. But then I yak too much and do nothing.
manisha, the fertiliser we use from our nursery is organic. otherwise, we wouldn’t use it once a month. (from may to september) in CA, we bought a house where the yard was a mess. it took us two seasons to get it into shape. it takes time, esp. in our kind of weather. seed it once a month. that’s the best long-term solution. – bee