North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Bob Randall <YearRoundGardening@comcast.net>]

Some years ago while trying to advise gardeners and farmers all over the Houston area, I became aware of just how bad the existing USDA zones were--both out of date and not very helpful, and insensitive to local differences (the area has places where there is one frost every other year and others where there are 25-40 every winter).  I started doing web based research on historical weather in the Houston Galveston College Station Metro Region.  What I found was that even the weather data is not collected as if people used it for plants.  

For example, if you wanted to know how many frosts to expect in a winter--suppose you want to grow a lemon or protect your peppers for example--you can't find this out easily since the weather data is collected and reported by calendar year.  It is actually necessary to manually count up all fall winter and spring dates for the last part of one year and second part of another to get a total, and then do it for that location for the last ten or 20 years

As anyone with math training knows, averages (mean or median??) tell you very little about the extremes or their frequency, and plants care mostly about that.  So I decided to report frequencies, rather than averages

So what I did was a lot of mind numbing counting on NOAA web sites. But the way of reporting is much more useful if you grow fruits or vegetables.

See http://www.urbanharvest.org/advice/basics/weather_data.html

This is for our area, but there is no reason why similar effort wouldn't work anywhere.

Bob Randall

On Feb 21, 2009, at 3:01 PM, Michele Stanton wrote:

The USDA climate zones are not meant as an all-encompassing guide to what grows where.  They are based on average winter minimum temperatures, and nothing more.   Their main advantage is that they are so widely used.  You can find similar maps for almost any country or area in the world now. Read more at: http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/index.html

 

Those of you West of the Rockies should look at the Sunset climate zones.  They're a much more accurate picture of climates.  I introduce students to Sunset's national maps even though I live in the Midwest. I wish they were more widely used.  They're based on a larger number of factors, such as minimum and maximum temperatures, rainfall amount and timing, humidity, and length of the growing season. Check them out at:  http://www.sunset.com/garden/climate-zones/

 

Some nurseries use a combination of USDA zones and AHS heat zones, which is at least a little more helpful.  If you haven't used the AHS heat zones, you can obtain info for your area by entering your zip code.

 

http://www.ahs.org/publications/heat_zone_map.htm

 

Michele in SW Ohio

 

 

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YearRoundGardening@comcast.net

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