The New Year dawned cold but sunny. I discover that I do like the sun! but only when the temperatures are below 70F. Reading over my garden journal I see how every fall and winter I plan and plant anew. The amount of plants I’ve killed over the years is sobering. And reading about my excitement and hopes and how my many plans came to nothing puts a damper on plans for this new year. For the first time I see the downside of keeping a journal.<\/p>\n
Yet it’s difficult not to throw oneself into gardening when the days are so fine. Add the fact that we had a bit of our usual December rain and you’ll understand why it’s said that hope springs eternal. The success of my first winter vegetable garden encourages me to make new plans.<\/p>\n
I spend a lot of time writing about the reversal of seasons down south. Lately I’ve been thinking that if summer is really our dead season, why shouldn’t I treat it as such. Why not help the garden go completely dormant, cover it up with mulch, and wait out the worst of summer. As long as this drought continues (the one in the 1950s lasted seven years), our summers are getting hotter and we have more and more days over 100F degrees.<\/p>\n
Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening posted recently about the USDA hardiness zone maps<\/a> and I replied that in Austin I’m more concerned with the data in the relatively new AHS Heat Zone Map<\/a>. Some plants suffer heat damage in temperatures as low as 86F degrees. In Austin, temperatures top 86F degrees 50 to 65 percent of the days in the year. Finding the right heat-loving plants is part of the fun of gardening, a challenge tempered with failure. We plant native plants but I, for one, want something more than plants that merely survive. If we try Mediterranean or desert plants in our dry years, we risk losing them to humidity in our wet years. If we plant tropicals, we worry about that one hard freeze a year wiping them out.<\/p>\n The number of days in a row where temperatures are above freezing but below 86F is hard to calculate but generally speaking Austin has two short prime growing seasons from mid-September to mid-November and mid-February to mid-May. Here at Zanthan Gardens plants receive more sunlight in December after the leaves of our large deciduous trees have fallen than in July. And, on the average, more rain.<\/p>\n As I spend my days tending my cool-weather vegetables and planting out my cottage annuals (which don’t require a struggle to dig deep holes in the clay and endless roots of bindweed), I wonder why not just stop here? Enjoy the spring flush of flowers and pack it in for the summer. Forget the short-lived perennials and roses which never receive enough light in the summer and yet demand water, feeding, and attention. Sling a hammock in the deep shade and forget about gardening in summer. Become a cold season gardener.<\/p>\n Is it possible?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Could it be that I’m really a cold climate gardener–or more precisely, a cold season gardener? I consider giving up gardening in summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5395,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions\/5395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}