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45 Degrees North: Garden Fever [1]
['Donna Kallner', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-02-23
Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its plant hardiness zone maps. Zone maps are tools to help gardeners select plants that can survive and thrive in a particular location. Or to put it another way, zone maps are tools to help gardeners avoid the expense and heartbreak of planting things that really don’t stand a chance.
Sure. Like a speed dating score sheet ensures true love.
Every northern gardener I know seems dedicated to some quixotic quest. One friend saves seeds with the goal of producing a particular heirloom tomato variety tolerant of both our short growing season and the limited sunlight available on her wooded property. Another, who lives even farther north, grows regionally adapted flint corn for grinding. Neither is likely to celebrate the general nationwide shift to the next warmer half-zone. Nor would I, if it weren’t for lima beans.
Specifically, Christmas lima beans. It takes a 95-day growing season to mature those big, beautiful Phaseolus lunatus for drying. Here in rural northern Wisconsin, I keep frost covers handy into June and bring them back out by mid-September. If you do the math, a 100-day growing season isn’t completely out of the question. Except that our soil doesn’t really warm up until mid-June, and it cools down fast around the end of August. And our nights tend to be cool throughout the summer. It’s a great place to live, unless you’re a lima bean. And yet, I can picture them at a potluck – homegrown beans, celery, onions and garlic, with local maple syrup or boiled cider to temper the vinegar. Folks who appreciate a good, nutty lima bean salad can understand why I might be tempted to nurture a crop like an ill-fated romance. The phrase Bean Stalker comes to mind.
At this point, I’m uncertain whether I’ve talked myself into or out of trying to grow them. The rational part of my brain is reviewing reasons for and against, and what else I could be learning from this exercise – which I share with you. Stay tuned to the end for a head-scratcher for rural gardeners about sweet corn.
Minimum Temperature
Plant hardiness zones represent the average annual extreme minimum temperature in a region over the past 30 years. That may not reflect the coldest it has been or will be at a specific location. It’s just a specific, measurable indicator of what is generally a crucial factor in the survival of perennial plants, shrubs and trees. Find your zone by typing your zip code in the box here. My Zone 4b average annual extreme minimum temperature is -25 to -20 degrees Fahrenheit. After a more extreme cold snap, some shrubs may benefit from a hard pruning in early spring, if the deer and rabbits don’t make that necessary anyway by nibbling on them all winter.
Other Metrics
Hardiness zones can tell a gardener something about how resilient a plant could be to winter stress, but that’s just one metric important to rural gardeners. Growing Degree Days (GDD) describe the season available for plants to grow and mature. Heat Zones map the number of days per year when high temperatures (86°F or warmer) can stress plants. Projections suggest we will see increases in both of those metrics in this century. That’s something to keep in mind when selecting trees and shrubs for new plantings. I’m inclined to select for extreme cold hardiness, but ought to start giving heat stress more consideration.
Variables
Those who have turned the green eyes of envy on a friend’s garden should remember this: We may be growing in the same hardiness zone with the same GDD and Heat Zone as our green-thumbed neighbors. But those metrics don’t account for important variables. For example, the pavement in town can hold heat and help warm the soil earlier in the spring. And soil temperature is important in seed germination. That’s why one favorite bit of garden lore is to plant tender crops when the soil is warm enough to sit your bare butt on the ground comfortably. Or you could use your hand or a soil thermometer, but those are not as much fun as the old wives method – which you should totally do if you live in a rural area where there aren’t neighbors close enough to call the cops on a naked gardener.
Microclimates
While you are swanning about in the altogether assessing soil temperature, make a mental map of other features that influence microclimates – pocket areas that can be warmer or cooler than the surrounding terrain. My mother was quietly proud of the Oriental poppies she grew near the dryer vent, which created a very favorable microclimate. I learned from a neighbor to grow tomatoes in buckets along the southwest-facing wall of the house. You can find the low spots where cold air pools first without being naked. You can even alter the landscape to create advantageous microclimates or minimize characteristics you find unattractive. But in the long run, that may be like assuming you can transform a potential life partner into what you want instead of what they are. In both cases, it might be wise to spend a bit more time getting to know each other and learning to live with idiosyncrasies before hiring the bulldozer.
Buyer Beware
Being ever attracted to a good close-out sale, I once came close to buying bulbs from the big box store in town – until I read the packaging. Even at that price, I wouldn’t waste my time with a prepackaged product mix suited for Zone 7. Here in Zone 4 those bulbs were unlikely to return and multiply year after year, although I’m sure the squirrels would have enjoyed eating them.
Local Knowledge
Metrics are handy but hardly a substitute for local knowledge. I learned that lesson many years ago the expensive way. Yes, I was seduced by the glossy pictures of zone-appropriate varietals in a specialist rose catalog. They were beautiful – for two years. One hard winter, though, and they were dead to me. A few years later when my heart was somewhat recovered from the loss, I turned to the matchmaker at a nearby garden center. She hooked me up with a Théresè Bugnet shrub rose that’s hardy enough to withstand our occasional minus-forties temperatures and the nibbling rabbits. We are living happily ever after.
Kissing Frogs
In love and gardening, we make some questionable choices on the road to a happy ending. The trick is deciding when to give something more time or to just move on. Especially when you really, really, really want it to work out. One corner of our house, for example, has a spot that has resisted my every effort to produce food. It simply doesn’t get enough sun for most of what I grow. Oh, I had a nice container of cilantro there one summer, but one does not live by cilantro alone. I kissed that frog, and it tasted faintly like soap. I don’t doubt that my mother could have coaxed a clematis to thrive in that spot. And I certainly enjoy looking at a clematis. But I’m much more attracted to, say, beans. So I moved on, and am quite happy with absolutely nothing growing there. But as with frogs that do turn princely when kissed, with plants you don’t know unless you try.
Patience
Patience can be difficult for a new gardener or a gardener new to a different growing zone or soil type. One friend always says, “If you could only see it in my head.” Generally I know exactly what she meant in about five years. When she was younger, she could knock that down to three years with backbreaking labor and the generous application of greenbacks. We will not discuss the unattainable gardening ambitions in my own sordid past except to say this: As I get older and slower, I find a great deal of satisfaction in chipping away at important garden goals and leaving room for madcap ideas, big and small.
Why Not?
One year when I was away from home too much to start seeds indoors, I tossed basil seeds into a bed the first week in July. Direct sowing proved to be as effective for my needs as babying leggy seedlings through transplant shock. Another year I tested whether I could get an earlier harvest from snow peas by using cloches to create a slightly warmer microclimate. Compared to the peas planted two weeks later, there was so little difference that now I just wait. One year I might have thrust some squash seeds and just enough dirt to help with germination into bales of bad hay abandoned in a fencerow, and harvested a small but very satisfying crop without another moment of work or watering. This year, I’m going to plant a chaos garden to use up odds and ends of seed packets that are getting old. Hmong market gardeners in my area interplant different crop items in a manner I have heard confuses pests and delights pollinators. Their system looked higgledy-piggledy to my late straight-rows father but makes sense to me.
My dad and I both had a good laugh once over sweet corn. Friends who own a suburban garden center told us so many customers asked about “corn starts” that they decided to try selling them. Dad thought it was a joke: Why would anyone go to the trouble and expense of starting a seed you just poke into the ground? Does sweet corn even tolerate transplantation? “I never even thought to try it,” he said. We were both astounded that my friends found it profitable enough to keep selling corn starts.
I wish Dad was still here for me to tell this: I just Googled “starting sweet corn indoors”. Apparently, it’s a thing. I’m not going to try it, but I’m glad it works for others. And yet, if sweet corn can be successfully transplanted, what about lima beans?
Must be the garden fever talking.
Donna Kallner writes from Langlade County in rural northern Wisconsin.
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