Dayton "Dirt" - January 10, 2014

What a blast of cold weather this past week! While we’re officially in climatic Zone 6 which indicates a maximum low temperature of 0ºF to -10ºF, temperatures, some areas dropped even more. At the nursery, the reading was at -12ºF just after midnight on January 7th. With the gusting winds and low temperatures it remains to be seen what damage or death of some ornamental plants may have occurred in early spring. Some more snow cover as was originally forecast would have helped greatly to seal off some of the cold and dry winds accompanied by this polar vortex. Our “official” climatic Zone 6 was determined by the Government to be that average of 30 years of weather data; however, occasionally temperatures can still drop us into climatic Zone 5. The 30 year average moving us up to Zone 6 is amazing because of the cold snaps of the late 1970’s, 1983, 1985 and the grand finale when the temperature dropped to a record -26ºF in 1994 to become the coldest temperature in Akron, Ohio since records were kept beginning in 1886. Before the “big freeze” I had been very busy at the nursery watering somewhat dry nursery storage huts as the root system on the plants would have been killed. Mr. John Ravenstein had told me about this phenomenon years ago when he worked at Klyn Nursery in Mentor, Ohio. In the 1960’s, Mr. Klyn was watering plants on the dry side in a winter storage hut and ran out of hose length so that he did not finish the job. In spring, Mr. Ravenstein observed that all the plants that were watered were fine in spring but those that Mr. Klyn left unwatered had all died after a severe cold snap. Other of my jobs around the nursery included the placement of an additional overwintering fabric on herbaceous perennials to protect the roots above ground in the storage huts as well as the placement of a product called microfoam over thousands of azaleas in storage. Azaleas have a tender root system that would be killed during a cold snap like this past week. The microfoam is a spongy polymer of a thickness of only ¼ inch. The insulating properties of this microfoam is amazing in that even after sustained cold weather in the single digits or lower only the top half of a plant root system ball will freeze as the ground heat is contained below the plants. I use the word ‘microfoam” to describe this overwintering blanket as the Dupont company used this trade name to differentiate it from other similar products. Although the much warmer weather is a great relief, too warm of sustained temperatures would not be a “good” thing either. A slow gradual warm up after mid-February would be ideal for farmers and gardeners. One wild ride of polar weather this winter is more than enough! Tom