Tigerdawn I agree with their planting zone map. We were in zone six on some maps but many still had us as zone 5. We should of been zone 6 for sometime. And some vendors still want to consider us zone 5 and not ship plants/trees when they should be shipped and planted. Which has forced me to use vendors I hadn't planned to use. Here is it critical to get trees ect in the ground as early as possible to give them a chance.Jay

Hopefully by next year the new maps will change their shipping times.

New Climate Normals is not looking good to me.

Does it means more warmer winter and much hotter summer.

So expect early SPRING, too early and extended SUMMER and late FALL, and much warmer WINTER with little Snowfall. Please correct me if my interpretation is wrong. I hope my interpretation are completely wrong!

-Chandra

Well, you are partially correct. The climatologists are predicting generally warmer and wetter weather. They are also predicting more extreme events. So more droughts like this one, more floods like the midwest has, more blizzards like this last winter, etc.

From what I can tell, we are only about 1 degree warmer here, the problem is the extra icemelt in the arctic that will add to the atmospheric moisture and cause more precipitation overall and generally crazy extreme weather.

I'm not really looking forward to the warmer summers but the added precip will be nice.

The lady I heard on the radio was saying that tornadoes are the one weather event they aren't sure on. They have no idea how the climate will affect our tornadoes. I'm going to bet on larger ones since we seem to have had more of those in the last decade or so.

If things keep going like they have been, we may have to have two distinct gardening seasons, with a break in July and August.