I had to double-check that I was still on the New England thread. I recently toured a permaculture garden that only gets careful watering by buckets and from their greywater. Each of their small animal coops/sheds has a rainwater collection system. Not only does it eliminate demand on their shallow well, they don't have a long walk with heavy buckets of water.

We have a drilled well and usually only water on weekends. I set a sprinkler at the lowest amount to water a bed. The vegetable garden dirt is pretty dry but does contain a lot of organic matter. In another location, a perennial bed that has not received additional watering is in very good shape but I suspect the additional moisture is due to a high water table in that part of our property. Nearby is a marshy meadow and seasonal stream.

The neighbor farmer has field corn planted and hayfields nearby. The only water they receive is rainfall. We haven't had much but the corn looks pretty good. It started out as a good hay year and he hoped to get three cuttings. Will only be two.

Our lawn doesn't look too bad. It gets some shade during part of the day. The herb garden has not been watered. It's against the kitchen porch.

This summer is dryer than usual. My husband decided it was dry enough to mow the marshy meadow but when the tractor got close to the area of the seasonal stream, it got stuck in mud.

If there is, it's probably somewhere in the northeast or upper Mid-west of the US. The Northwest is very wet on the west and very dry on the east side of the Cascades.

I have pondered the idea of moving south to get a longer grower season, but we have a pretty good climate here in New England as far as average, regular rainfall, plus it doesn't get too hot in the summer, generally, with relatively few days over 90 F. If the winters continue to get milder as the climate changes, then this could be a pleasant place to stay put.

I have a theory that in the future people may migrate north to places like New England, instead of the other way around. 1) because we have water here, and 2), because the summers may become unbearably hot and dry in more southern parts of the country.

Defrost, I am curious why would your husband would decide to mow a marshy meadow?

terrene, I think you're right about a possible northerly trend from further south in the US, as the climate gets warmer. I'm already seeing it in some overwintering birds (Carolina Wren, for example) that used to disappear from NE after the summer, and that now live here year-round.

But I'm 800 ft. from the ocean and if the climate warms up, the icebergs melt, and the sea level rises. I've seen some maps of the future coastline with a higher sea level, and I worry that we'd be underwater here. In less than a century, perhaps. A good reason to (1) look around for a hilltop property and (2) enjoy this one while we can.

I also agree that New England is a great place to be, for gardening. The bad side of living further south for a longer growing season, however, is that then we wouldn't get that frost-months time off from gardening, sleeping late, and enjoying clean fingernails.!

Carol

terrene, my husband hates bushes growing up. It doesn't take long for an open space to become "puckerbrush" and eventually go back to woods. This meadow has a seasonal stream that has changed course sometime in the last 30 years or so. We are not sure if at one time this area was used as pasture or not. In the spring, there can be a shallow pond. The stream can become a 4' rushing torrent. It's pretty customary around here to mow unused "pasture" once a year to keep bushes from growing up. The town mows the edges of the road once a year, too, for the same reason.
We have other areas that are left wild.

Yes, got it Defrost, that's a good idea except when the tractor gets stuck, haha. Especially since in many places a lot of those bushes are going to be invasive plants like Buckthorn.

I think that people who have very large lawns could consider letting some of their turf grass go to meadow, and mow 1-2 x per year instead of weekly or every other week. Provide some habitat for critters, use less fossil fuel, and still have an open space that does not succeed into "puckerbrush" and eventually forest. I think meadows are prettier than turf grass anyway!

Around here, you have to mow more than once or twice a year to keep the brush down. It also takes more serious equipment to mow once it gets to a certain height. Between those two things, I have absolutely no design to mow less often than I currently do.

Successful 'meadow' here is mowed about once a month.

I am no expert in mowing, but doing it monthly is likely to disturb or kill wildlife that is nesting or using it as habitat. Mowing and cutting down the woody plants 2x per year, in the spring and fall, would knock anything out that grows around here (don't know about Kudzu). Can't imagine even oriental bittersweet getting a decent hold with that.

Multiflora rose, black raspberries, poison ivy, red cedar - all of these establish quite well with twice a year mowing. Basically all the classic early succession nasties.

The problem is that most of them are flexible enough to bend *under* the mowing flail. So they don't get cut off close to the ground. They get bent down, somewhat protected and supported by the perennial wildflowers and grasses. So two weeks after the cutting, they are back. What has been removed is their competition.

Bittersweet would be a total nightmare under those conditions.

For us, twice yearly is fine to maintain a field, but once yearly isn't. DH mows with a tractor-pulled brush hog, a large single rotary blade rather like a lawnmower on steroids. He did need to mow monthly when we first moved in (for probably the first 3 seasons) to return to slightly shrubby field to grass, and we did spot use herbicide on a few stubborn poison ivy plants after that for a couple of seasons, but now twice a year is fine.