Are strong winds unusual for you in winter, marceli?

Barb

Yes, this is unusual along with these temperatures. The good thing is that Spring is getting closer 😉

You'll cut those stalks Mike, and they'll come up from the roots.
Stronger than before, and more pups. 😀

Thanks Barb! It is supposed to be in the 60s here this weekend,....Crazy!!!!! 😯

Just wondering who here has actually had a temp this winter BELOW their zonal rating?
Toronto- z 6a, z. 6a low.
Kingston- z4b/5a, z. 5a low.

probably was done before, but can you please explain the plant hardiness zones?

The Canadian index is based on 7 climate variables, not just minimum temperature

Markham is in a 5b zone. According to the US zoning the minimum temperature for us 5b is
−26.1 °C (−15 °F) to −23.3 °C (−10 °F)

Looking at historical data in TWN, the lowest temperature for Markham was -35.2C, recorded Jan 16 1994.

A little confusing,

Tavi

Just wondering who here has actually had a temp this winter BELOW their zonal rating?
Toronto- z 6a, z. 6a low.
Kingston- z4b/5a, z. 5a low.

It depends on which side of Springfield you're in. We had a 5b winter. Half of Springfield is 5b and half is 6a. Nevertheless it was -13f here so it got pretty deep into the 5b. I saw St. Louis MO got to -13F as well and they are rated as a 6b.

Winter is arrived but don't know if it last long. It's about 5inch. of snow but it's pretty warm: -2.5C/27F in the morning and +1C/34F now. Unfortunately it's raining a little. I hate that kind of weather 🙁

So mild, marceli, that's not winter 😆
Sure makes the snow heavy though.

The zone rating (USDA, I don't use the Canadian map, it just causes people to underestimate how cold they get) is based on the average extreme minimum temperature that you are likely to experience each year. So, for markham the average winter will hit -26C or whatever. However, it's possible that you'd have subsequent winters of -32C, -24C, -22C, -18C, -22C or whatever, and have them average out to -26C giving the zone 5b rating. Of course the zone rating should be based on the longest available data set for your area.

Does that make sense?

Thank you Paul,

So is there a place where we can check the usda zone for our area, or we have to calculate it ourselves?

Thank you Paul,

So is there a place where we can check the usda zone for our area, or we have to calculate it ourselves?

Yeah, check this out, USDA for Ontario... This seems to include a detailed map, unlike the Canadian sites I've come across which seem vague at best.

http://www.plantmaps.com/interactive-ontario-plant-zone-hardiness-map.php

I do like that map! Methinks it is a little generous in some areas (extent of zone 5 along the shore of lake ontario and the st. lawerence river; only the island airport in Toronto gives a 6b rating, Pearson is a 5b). Best option available though! Thanks for the link.

Lowest temp so far is -6C/but local forecast says in two weeks it's supposed to be warm again. We'll see... 🙂

Thank you for the map link

Tavi

A new low for me this morning I got to wake up to -26C. According the long range forecast I won't see anything above freezing until first week of February. I'm certainly hope that's true. I hope everything is ok under the protection. Next nice day I will pull the protection and apologize to each plant individually 😉

A bit of an update I have a weather station down the block from me that I log data from every 15 minutes and stuff it in a database do I can do all sorts of trending and other analysis with. So I got down to -26C just after 4AM and it held there until just after 8AM so 4 hours I'm sure my plants are plenty angry with me.

If anyone else is a real computer geek I can certainly give you the code to do what I'm doing it's PHP/MySQL based it harvests data from the wunderground API via JSON. The harvesting and logging functions are finished now. I'm just rewriting functions to re-output JSON to be consumed by other stuff like my home automation platform and a query framework I'm working on. Currently my query's are strictly based select statements from the database.