I was reading over @ Hanna‘s ‘This Garden Is Illegal’, and in one of her posts Black Swamp Girl,Kim, remarked in the comments about the effect of all this mild weather on plants. We are all Ohioans, “Buckeyes”.
There are ideas that global warming is actually a natural phenomenon, etc. and while many can argue their views well, I tend to think we can’t really know at this point and that it just generally makes sense to try to follow the best policies for the overall environment. IOW, act as if we might have global warming and be able to do something about it.
But the question wasn’t on that- it was how does this warming in winter effect your plants in the garden for the coming season?
What you have to watch for is the damage that comes from such things as breaking dormancy too soon and getting caught by later (yes, I bet it is coming) freezing weather damage, plants heaving out of the ground and leaving the roots exposed to drying winds, and things like that. If your trees bud they will have some damage. I saw some of this last year. It doesn’t matter when the warming/chilling takes place, but if it does, you find tree damage of some sort. There isn’t anything the normal gardener can do about it, that I know of. In Citrus country they spray down their trees with coatings of ice, but we wouldn’t ever be able to do that on any widespread scale here. Don’t be fooled by trees looking fine in April. They have to make it through July- then you know the full extent of the damage. I had a sweet gum that looked fine while I made late spring rounds, but died. I cut it down to the a little above the ground,and am nurturing a few of the sprouts, culling all but the tallest at some point this coming year. The other three gum trees made it through.
Bulbs are usually OK if they are mulched, but we didn’t get much cold and no snow in the Central part of our state. I checked on some of the viburnums, but my garden is so wet right now I haven’t been out in it to see what is going on. Things look different from afar sometimes.
One nice thing about the warmth is the amount of Spring-like singing the birds are doing around here. I have noticed that.
The Farmers Almanac did not predict this, but that prediction about lots of snow for the more western part of the US was right-on…it just seems somewhat more west than their forecast. When I wrote on “Winter’s Blast I was fooled by the prospect of an actual winter…. and by the idea that “we do expect this to be the coldest winter we’ve seen for quite a few years.”. Not this year, boys.
