What a mess the rain made last week. Our nice coating of snow is gone and what we are left with is mud. Yesterday marked the winter solstice, the shortest daylight day of the year, so now we are officially in winter. You might be glad to see the snow go, but as I have mentioned many times before it makes a great insulator for your plant roots. With the warm-up and the rain, the surface roots, which are your feeder roots, that were frozen are now thawed again and soon they will be frozen again. 

If this happens too many times in the fall or the spring these roots will die causing major damage to your plants if not killing them all together. So remember this crazy weather when you wonder why your plants died over the course of the winter. If you had previously wrapped your plants with burlap and put leaves or mulch around the base, your plants are protected from much of this cat and mouse game that the weather is playing right now. When it gets cold, your plants want it to stay cold until spring, unfortunately that rarely happens. The days of feet of snow on the ground for Christmas does seem to be over for now and to that end, the USDA has revamped the climate zone map. Now whether you believe in global warming or not, temperatures have slowly risen over the past one hundred years and the USDA climate zone map hasn’t kept up until now. For the northern end of Sullivan county there isn’t much change, but below Liberty has now been reclassified as zone 6a (-10 to -5). 

The Shawangunk Ridge between Wurtsboro and Bloomingburg used to be the zonal boundary between zone 5 and zone 6, but now it is the line between zone 6a and zone 6b. Zone 5 has receded now to north of route 55 on the east side of Liberty and again the north side of route 52 on the west side of Liberty. Most of Sullivan county is now listed as zone 6a, which could open up a whole new range of plants available this spring. We would never bring in plants that were not hardy to zone 5, but now we might try some varieties that customers have been asking about, but that I know are zone 6 plants. But that is a conversation for another column this spring. Right now I’m just hoping for a little snow on the ground so that I don’t have to look at mud. Either way, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.