Peach trees in Minnesota
Read Time:4 Minute, 28 Second
Today, July 1st, the temperature here in rural Minnesota is expected to reach 91. By Wednesday, we are looking at 99. Ninety nine degrees. And that’s not a dry heat, oh no, that’s humidity so fierce, you sweat just thinking about it. It’s not supposed to be this hot this early.
Minnesota is one of the fastest warming states in America. According to a report from Climatecentral.org, since the 1970’s, all states have showed warming, but 10 states are warming much more quickly than others. Rhode Island is the fastest warming state, while Minnesota, Maine, Arizona and New Mexico are not far behind.
My dad and I know that when it comes to planting, warmer temperatures mean new options for gardening. From azstarnet.com:
The color-coded map of planting zones often seen on the back of seed packets is being updated to reflect a hotter 21st century.
It’s the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has revised the official guide for the nation’s 80 million gardeners, and much has changed. Nearly entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are in warmer zones.
The new guide, unveiled Wednesday at the National Arboretum, arrives just as many home gardeners are receiving their seed catalogs and dreaming of lush flower beds in the spring.
It reflects a new reality: Some plants and trees can now survive farther north.
“People who grow plants are well aware of the fact that temperatures have gotten more mild … particularly in the wintertime,” said Boston University biology professor Richard Primack.
“There’s a lot of things you can grow now that you couldn’t grow before.”
His giant fig tree stands as an example: “People don’t think of figs as a crop you can grow in the Boston area. You can do it now.”
The new guide also uses better weather data and offers more interactive technology.
For example, gardeners using the online version can enter their ZIP code and get the exact average coldest temperature.
The map carves up the U.S. into 26 zones based on five-degree temperature increments. The 1990 map mentions 34 U.S. cities. On the 2012 map, 18 of those, including Honolulu, St. Louis, Des Moines, Iowa, St. Paul, Minn., and even Fairbanks, Alaska, are in warmer zones.
A fig tree in Boston? Why not a peach tree in Minnesota? This past winter was one of the mildest I had ever experienced. Yes, it got cold, but not nearly as cold as I remember. February in Minnesota is supposed to be a bitter, raw month, when you wear every item of clothing you own, slather your skin with Vaseline and shovel 46″ of snow off your driveway. We had one pathetic snowstorm, temperatures didn’t really get that bad, and we couldn’t even go snowshoeing.
But climate change is just a myth, right? Not according to George Ball, chairman and CEO of W. Altee Burpee, the famous seed company. Burpee seed packets will reflect the new temperature zones for next year’s gardeners, but Ball says “Climate change, which has been in the air for a long time, is not big news to gardeners.”
He’s right. My wildflowers, which normally would be a cacophony of color right now, are fried. I have one brave poppy, and everything else is the color of sand. Spraying and watering at dusk makes no difference when the next day is 97 degrees. Our vegetable garden is struggling to make sense of this, and I fear we will not see a good harvest this year. It’s too hot, too early. We will adapt, thanks in no small part to online maps and the new information from Burpee, but this year, we’re probably going to kiss it all goodbye.
In front of our house, the farmers planted soy this season. Among the sea of green, you can see patches of brown. Trees, usually bright green at this time, are fading fast. The corn is much higher this year than the same time last year. Something is happening, and as a lay person, I have no idea what the outcome will be. What I do know is June and early July are never this hot, never this dangerous, and never this damaging to plants.
Climate change is not a myth; we’re living it right now. Whatever you believe-nature made or man made-it’s real and it’s here. It’s up to us to change along with the climate, adapt and learn what we can plant and what we can’t. And who knows, maybe in five years, there will be a peach tree in our backyard.
If you garden or farm, what changes have come to your state? Are there new crops, plants and flowers you plan to use next year that were previously unable to flourish? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to AZStarnet.com and Climate Central.org for information contained in this article, and my dad.
Follow MadMike’sAmerica on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to visit our HOME PAGE.
If you liked our story please share it at REDDIT.COM and PINTEREST as well as TUMBLR.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Not to toss a pebble in your pond dear scribe but peaches a relatively hardy fruit that can be grown in any controlled environment. Factually speaking peaches have been grown successfully from Idaho to Georgia meaning it has nothing to do with the latest movement by the liberal fanatics to convince us that global warming is making our peaches move.
Global warming is like a slow cancer. Some of the damage it does is slow and barely noticeable until all of a sudden it is and now it is, evidenced, in part, by what you have told us Erin. I am pretty sure it’s a stage 4 by now. Not much we can do but watch and wait for the inevitable.
I agree. We’ve gone too far, and it is indeed inevitable.