Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Been checking the National Weather Service's website an awful lot recently? Yep. Me too. And not just for tornado warnings. St. Louis' weird weather has gotten exponentially weirder this year, or so it seems to me. I don't know what seeds to plant at what time, what seedlings to stick in the ground, when to cover my plants up or when to let them breathe. It's almost Mother's Day, and yesterday I was scraping frost off my windshield. I was just grateful that I'd been too lazy to plant my herbs over the weekend.
But gardeners are accustomed to dealing with frosts and freezes, a surplus or deficit of ran, and the fact that the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map has shifted. Both things have been blamed pretty universally on climate change, and most observers agree that unpredictable weather is becoming more frequent and more intense. Though some have presented climate change as a positive thing for gardeners, most posit that the negative effects, including an increase in pests and molds, have outweighed any benefits. Either way, gardening in the 21st century is less easy and less predictable than it was even late in the 20th. And in St. Louis, which has always had flukey weather, that's a real challenge.
So, to get some insight and help about how gardeners should respond to these weather events, we called up Chip Tynan, a master gardener with the Missouri Botanical Garden's Kemper Center for Home Gardening help line. We figured that if anyone could bring a sane point of view to the subject of crazy weather, it was him. And we were right.
On the topic of unseasonal coolness: "The whole issue of average last frost date, which is the middle of April, the 15th, is true," Tynan says. "At the same time, the latest historic freeze for this part of east-central Missouri is the 10th of May. So there is a precedent for a frost happening an entire week later. As they say in baseball and meteorology, records are made to be broken."
He agrees that this recent over-abundance of rain is problematic, because plant roots can rot from soil saturation, especially in poorly draining clay soil. But, he adds, the recent boom in edible gardening and raised beds will save a lot of people some trouble here. "You have much better drainage, and you can get in & work your soil faster than you would otherwise," he says. "Raised beds also warm up faster than ground level garden rows. But these are the very events for which you plan and plant in well-drained soils. Because there will always be these periods of excessive moisture that roll around, not like clockwork, but every now and then in this part of the continent."
As far as long-range weather forecasts, Tyner is a fan of KTVI's Dave Murray. "Dave is still maintaining that we are going to have a cool and above-normal precip May," Tynan says. "This isn't going away anytime soon...So gardeners have to be like Boy Scouts, in the sense that they have to be prepared. Plant in well-drained soils. Keep the hose handy for those lengthy droughts. And in between, just kind of go with the flow."
I admitted I was a fan of the Old Farmer's Almanac, because it seems sage (and looks really cool), but have never tracked its accuracy in predicting weather, though I know people who swear by it. "It's folksy," Tynder chuckles. "I like it because of that. Over the years, on few occasions that I've paid attention, they issue predictions for various parts of the country. And the Central Midwest is almost never one of those places. There is probably a reason for that. We're in a transition zone that can be Nome, Alaska one day and New Orleans the next. We're in the area where the north and south jet streams do battle right overhead. So our weather is tremendously unpredictable. The folks who do all these predictions often fudge it quite a bit. It's in a difficult place to both garden, and predict weather. But as a gardener, you ought to be ready to accept challenges, and succeed in spite of the obstacles nature puts in front of us."
And if that sounds just too exhausting or too much to put up with...well, there's always the Aerogarden.
