Martin Mikulcik
Full Access Member
This is something I've been thinking about recently. When you are trying to grow something you don't know how to grow, you look at where it originated.
You can compare pH, extreme temperature, average temperature, length of growing season, and rainfall patterns and you end up with something pretty similar to the köppen map
Now for me, in the last five years we've gotten as low as -13F and as high as 104F. We've had years with 30ish inches of rain and years with 60. Last July/August was the driest since 1960 with 2.25in. That's why i didn't get any late butternut squash.
Native plants are built to withstand these conditions. You can tell it was a bad year when you see a few old oaks die. They've lived a hundred years and this was the breaking point.
And so as gardeners we modify our climate if we want to grow things from dissimilar climates. Irrigation, soil amendments, greenhouses.
A lot of times we don't know really what we're striving for and so we respond to the plant's symptoms and learn from trial and error.
There's no such thing as a weak plant, it's tough as nails in the right environment, but some are more widely adapted than others
Now what I was realizing was that my rainfall pattern is opposite to europe's
You'll see Murray, Ky (and Missouri to a lesser extent), has an extremely wet spring that decreases as the season progresses. Rome follows the same pattern (which could explain why Italian varieties do pretty well actually)
The rest of Europe north of Italy gets wetter as the season progresses. And I've seen on certain plants where they won't root in the ground deep enough because there's plenty of spring water, then they dry up in the summer, because their roots are small.
So then i turned to Mexico down to South America and noticed another trend
It's a wet season/dry season climate, and this holds true all the way down to peru and up to el paso.
To demonstrate my ignorance, I have this association with Mexico as dry, because the sonora desert borders the usa. And for much of the year even the southern parts see little rain
This picture is just 20 miles from Mexico City, and you can see how it greens right up once the rains come.
And so a part of the world that's very dry and grows agaves and cacti can also grow monsoon plants that need even more water than I naturally get in my humid continental climate
You can compare pH, extreme temperature, average temperature, length of growing season, and rainfall patterns and you end up with something pretty similar to the köppen map
Now for me, in the last five years we've gotten as low as -13F and as high as 104F. We've had years with 30ish inches of rain and years with 60. Last July/August was the driest since 1960 with 2.25in. That's why i didn't get any late butternut squash.
Native plants are built to withstand these conditions. You can tell it was a bad year when you see a few old oaks die. They've lived a hundred years and this was the breaking point.
And so as gardeners we modify our climate if we want to grow things from dissimilar climates. Irrigation, soil amendments, greenhouses.
A lot of times we don't know really what we're striving for and so we respond to the plant's symptoms and learn from trial and error.
There's no such thing as a weak plant, it's tough as nails in the right environment, but some are more widely adapted than others
Now what I was realizing was that my rainfall pattern is opposite to europe's
You'll see Murray, Ky (and Missouri to a lesser extent), has an extremely wet spring that decreases as the season progresses. Rome follows the same pattern (which could explain why Italian varieties do pretty well actually)
The rest of Europe north of Italy gets wetter as the season progresses. And I've seen on certain plants where they won't root in the ground deep enough because there's plenty of spring water, then they dry up in the summer, because their roots are small.
So then i turned to Mexico down to South America and noticed another trend
It's a wet season/dry season climate, and this holds true all the way down to peru and up to el paso.
To demonstrate my ignorance, I have this association with Mexico as dry, because the sonora desert borders the usa. And for much of the year even the southern parts see little rain
This picture is just 20 miles from Mexico City, and you can see how it greens right up once the rains come.
And so a part of the world that's very dry and grows agaves and cacti can also grow monsoon plants that need even more water than I naturally get in my humid continental climate
