There have been 3 updates to the zones in the past 50 years. Some of the updates are due to better accuracy after years of collecting data, but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer. It has definitely affected my gardening.
This update is based on a dataset change that shifts the observation period by 15 years. Buried within a footnote that nobody will ever read:
> The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.
So while climate change may or may not be the explanation for broader trends in the map, you cannot rule out noise for any particular location, especially given that the methodology uses the lowest winter temperatures in that window as the basis for the zone. That's a fundamentally noisy metric. For example, this drops the blizzard of 1978 -- one of the largest ever in US history -- from the dataset. It's hard to know how that affects the zones without careful inspection, but major weather events like that can easily affect simple outlier analysis. You can see this in the dot plots for Raleigh (the default), which had two outliers in the winters around 1995, and then an otherwise flat series of data. What was the prior dataset? We don't know. Just look at the two default examples:
It would only take a small number of cold or warm winters to shift those means in either direction.
I don't want to overemphasize a silly little article about plants, but IMO, the fact that NPR buried this information while hyper-focusing on specific locations is just another failure of basic journalism. Telling people that an arbitrarily defined metric has been changed is meaningless, unless you tell people the specific change that was made. It should be the first or second thing they tell you, not buried in a hidden footnote.
And by "buried" you mean "dedicated a whole screen to it at legible size"? I don't wanna go back and count, but as I was scrolling through the sequence on mobile, it's definitely in there, up front and clear. Maybe you had a different experience of the website?
I appreciate data skepticism, but your point about the 1978 blizzard doesn't really help, as blizzards and snow events in general are not generally associated with extreme cold events.
Also, the site tells you about the changes in whatever place you plugged in. I'm not clear on why you're calling this "hyper-focusing on specific locations". It's literally telling you what's going on in your neighborhood and gives good reasons to even then discount the new number.
By "buried", I mean: "hidden in a collapsed 'about this data' accordion, below the 'change in lowest winter temperature' color bar, in the fourth text box that appears on downward scrolling."
Unless you're seeing a wildly different website than I am, this is a strange definition of "up front and clear".
But just to belabor the point a bit, if I were a journalist covering this, my lede -- the very first paragraph of the story -- would be something like this:
"Recently, the USDA updated its plant hardiness map for the first time in 11 years. Among other changes, it based the definition of winter temperatures on data from 1991-2020, dropping data from 1976-1991 as part of the update. This resulted in a calculated increase in lowest winter temperatures in many locations across the United States."
Simple. Factual. Unbiased. Provides necessary context. It isn't that hard to be a good journalist here. I hesitate to speculate, but my suspicion is that this was buried because it weakens a narrative that the writers and editors were trying to achieve, by adding nuance.
I don't think you understand how much gardeners, the nursery industry, and farmers rely on this data. We know things aren't the way they used to be. That's why you're starting to see so many "green thumb" people getting more vocal about climate change. They have first-hand experience with what's going on that isn't easy to dismiss with a hand-wave.
I know HN loves pedantry, but this criticism is overblown to the point of being misleading.
Look at the Raleigh graph - there are a few outliers, but the average (the one number being reported) is right in that cluster of flat years. And that's what's apparently gone up 5°
There is always going to be information lost when you condense 30 years into 1 number, but you are "pushing a narrative" far more than they are
The point was that you don't know what data they dropped by shifting the data 15 years forward, and that it only takes a few such "outliers" to shift the mean in an otherwise flat dataset. Moreover, you wouldn't know how flat the trend in the data actually is from the article itself.
For Raleigh (new zone high 8a, almost 8b) there are three winters in the low end of the "previous" zone of 7b in the last 10 years. For St Louis (new zone 7a) there were two winters in zone 6b and one in 5b (!) in the time since 2013. There were an equal number of winters in the "old zone" of 6b and the "new zone" of 6a in the dataset shown. Even calling that an outlier is stretching the definition of the term! And I didn't cherry-pick these examples...these were the ones NPR chose to highlight.
This isn't "pedantic". It's a basic understanding of statistics and the methods being applied here.
Climate change is rough here in Austin TX because it's getting hotter, but we're also getting more extreme spikes in freezing temperatures. There's a whole slew of plants and trees that can't survive here because of how cold it gets for only a couple days a year. It's not uncommon to lose something like a Palm tree due to one cold day out of the entire year.
I'm in Canada and spring is starting earlier and earlier every year but we will still get blasts of (what used to be normal for that time of year) frost/snow/freezing rain. The problem is with the warm weather, fruit trees will start to bud early and when the cold comes at night it kills all the buds and that's it, no fruit. Last year apple orchards all over lost their crops to this. The instability is what's going to cause chaos in the world.
Have you heard about the damage done to grape and stone fruit crops in BC? It has been happening consistently enough that I expect some vineyards not to exist in the next decade.
Even where I am it’s considered a temperate climate and a friend’s grape crops were almost totally destroyed from a snap freeze in late February. He said it wasn’t that uncommon for the freezes to happen when he started, but what changed is how early the vines start budding, like you mentioned.
Late-starting crops can bypass this problem, but my understanding is that they often need irrigation because they grow into the tail of summer. That’s not really viable here either, as water’s gradually diminishing from our extended drought.
BC wine industry in some areas purportedly had a crop loss of something like 90% by some estimates. With a 3 year turn around to re-establish the plants, and a very smoke tainted 2021, their industry is certainly in a trouble spot. Let's see if they have enough reserves to sell to get them past this disaster.
the whole area is actually surprisingly dry in terms of rain due to being in the rain shadow of the mountain. the lakes nearby make it tolerable, but even a small shift in climate patterns will turn the area into a near-desert.
Spring seems like it comes later and later to my eye. When I started farming in Canada we would have the ground prepped in mid-April and were really to start planting May 1st.
In the last 5-10 years we struggle to even get on the ground until mid-May. This year is no exception. May 13th already and we have only half of a field planted so far.
Yep, was thinking the same thing. Climate change is also (at least partially) responsible for instability in the polar vortexes that shoot south more often now. Between Winter Storm Uri in Feb 2021 and "icemageddon" in Feb 2023 we lost a ton of plants and trees. We have a retaining wall in the back of our property and had a couple giant, cascading rosemary bushes that completely covered the wall - they were so pretty and always smelled amazing. I still get sad thinking about how Uri took those beauties out...
Things like this make me want to install some kind of heaters near my most prized plants. The power cost would be pretty high, and they wouldn't be sufficient to make it through the winter or anything, but they might allow us to weather a night or two of freezing temperatures in the early spring.
Yeah... Ok, my average temperature increased by %4.x percent, but my variance increased by quite a bit more than that. The assumptions underlying the growing zone approximation were never great ones, but I find the whole idea largely irrelevant now. Cold snaps a good ten degrees below normal have now repeatedly killed established natives (as in you could find them in local wildlife preserves). And the long dry spells averaging what used to be the yearly high, now kill plants adapted to live in actual deserts. Is it wrong that part of me is fascinated to see what comes next?
It's not more meaningful in Kelvin. 1 to 4 is a 300% increase and so is 200 to 800. So hearing 300% tells you absolutely nothing, without the added context of "from the previous average temperature of the region".
> Percentages don’t mean anything in temperature unless it is Kelvin where 0 is truly 0.
Well, technically any absolute scale: Kelvin is the most common, but Rankine has the same feature. (It just uses Fahrenheit-sized degrees instead of Celsius-sized.)
Also in Austin. We have almost all native species, so no maintenance in theory but it's getting harder. We're focusing on drought resistance. I can do my best to cover the ones in danger of freezing on those few days, but harder to water everything constantly.
Might want to narrow the interests a bit or I'll get caught in a conversation about Elixir or something. I used to be a part of the Austin Hardware Startup meetup before it got enshittified but I've wanted to start something up again.
"Climate change" is already watered down from "global warming", because people were nitpicking that it wasn't always warmer everywhere. Things like the late cold snaps people mention in this thread. But: on average, it's warmer almost everywhere.
"Global warming" is what you get when you let the scientists pick the name. "Climate change" is better but you can still get the sense that it's lacking in a solid PR person to figure this out. I'd have thought that, by now, any of the hundreds of corporations attaching themselves to Sustainability, Inc. would've solved this particular naming problem for us.
The term "climate change" usage had a PR person behind it. Republican strategist Frank Luntz pushed for politicians to use the term instead of "Global warming" has it sounds less severe.
The term is often misattributed to Luntz, but it existed before him.
It just sounds a little dry. I think environmentalists have done a good job drilling the fact that it is a bad thing into us, but in the face of it “climate change” sounds like a sort of generic and neutral process. Global warming was a little better (I think? Or maybe I just grew up knowing it was a bad thing).
Climate Instability sounds sort of clearly bad (I think most people consider instability bad).
If we're workshopping this for you: "climate change" has alliteration and is only 3 syllables compared to "instability" which has a mouthful of 5 syllables.
It’s just the way the conversation happened to flow. I think everyone has an opinion on names.
For solutions I’m in favor of really aggressive carbon taxes and sanctions/secondary sanctions against that don’t implement them. But that’s the sort of thing better left to regulators and diplomats.
I seem to be getting lots of downvotes on what I thought was a pretty mundane and off the cuff post. Maybe there’s some history I’m not aware of.
My thought process was: Climate change is mostly bad, but it sounds like a sort of neutral, or even natural process. Environmentalists have done a good job pointing out that it is bad, but the name isn’t doing them any favors. Instability seems to be one of the major side effects and instability is very obviously bad.
I guess I’m curious if there’s a “pro-fixing the problem” argument against “climate instability.” By default I’m going to assume that I’m mostly being downvoted by climate deniers. But I’d be happy to be educated otherwise, if there’s a real argument against calling it instability.
I've written similar comments in other forums and have gotten a similar response. To me, global warming is on average true, but doesn't encompass the full range of negative local impacts.
Climate change feels euphemistic compared to climate instability. Like, all things change, so it's chill, right? I like "instability" because it feels like the time of chaos and contempt that the scientific consensus tells us we're facing.
But... then I realize I'm wordsmithing a problem. While rhetoric is important and all, I think many of our current issues get over-talked and under-actioned. I don't know that the wording is significant relative to other barriers to bringing about change.
I think instability sells it better to someone who is not sure if they believe in climate change because they can personally see it (worsening hurricanes, worsening cold snaps, hotter days).
I think the responses were reasonable. I’m still convinced Climate Change is not a very good name, somebody suggested Climate Crisis which just sounds better in every way. But anyway, the name is not the most pressing part of the whole thing.
If the reliable granular data is 100 years or so, and the core samples are known to be lacking granular indication… how a you prove that the spikes and dips are atypical?
Eh, try like 300 years at least; you can get data from 1662 to now easy from NOAA. Governments love to collect data about mundane things; you could probably get a larger archive from a country that existed prior to 1781.
Yea, I’m not sure we can rely on 1 degree of reliable resolution for when people believe in unicorns, dragons, a geocentric universe theory, and when the Celsius scale was not when water freezes at zero and boils at 100.
I don’t doubt that those records lacked quality due to inconsistent measuring equipment, standards, and practices. It has nothing to do with the beliefs of people at the time, though.
This was a time period in which scientists actually improved these technologies and practices, and we stand on the shoulders of that progress. They were doing the best they could with what they had.
Geocentrism was also well on the way out 300 years ago.
My point is mostly that people in the past did some great work, and having weird beliefs didn’t diminish that. People in the future will think we were similarly clueless for all kinds of reasons. You just do the best you can with the information and environment you’ve got.
One could use the same argument to include forest fire data prior to 1960, or to include heat/drought data prior to 1979, but climate alarmists do not want to do that because it destroys their narrative.
If you read what I said again, you should notice that I’m not saying the data from 300 years ago should necessarily be used. I’m saying that the reason not to use it has nothing to do with people believing in dragons or unicorns.
The part about measurements is fair (they weren’t standardized at the time), but the rest is irrelevant. The decision of whether or not to use data should be on the basis of its scientific rigour and veracity, not the scientist’s beliefs.
If they look atypical for the last 100 years or so, and also look atypical from the less "granular", even-longer-term samples... then how do you prove that they're typical?
I'm also in Austin and laughing a bit at these results. It seems like the dataset cuts off after 2020 while trying to illustrate that winters haven't gotten very cold lately, and that is the reason we've been changed to a different zone.
And yet just after that in 2021 we had temps drop to 0°F or slightly negative. In each of the subsequent 2 winters we've also had temps drop lower than anything shown on this graph :)
Same here. The longstanding "rule" for my area is "no planting before Mother's Day!"
For the last 8 years or so, ~April 20th has been very safe. I usually pick the first weekend after ~April 15th, which doesn't have an overnight low under 38 on the 10 day forecast. Haven't had an issue yet.
Thankfully some of the stores are starting to break the "rule", because for a long time it was impossible to even get plants before Mother's Day.
"No mow May" to save the bees/over-wintering insects - is now almost impossible as you'll have more than a foot high of regular lawn grass before June 1.
Genuine question: how does not mowing your lawn helps bees / insects?
I'm guessing that the lawn itself is incidental, and by not mowing you're letting flowers (including dandelions and clover?) grow?
Also, I'm gonna be up front about my ulterior motive: I hardly mow my lawn anyways and would love to have another reason to justify / rationalize what I'm already doing :)
I agree on the class-ist vibes of a perfect lawn, it seems ugly and pointless. If you're going to put in the work, why not a beautiful native plants garden?
I was surprised to learn that the average in my town had only gone up 1 degree since the last update. I expected a bigger jump like yours, purely based on vibes.
Many of the impacts of climate change have to do with increased variance rather than with shifted average.
For example, every +0C day in the winter leads to snow melt. The total amount of snow collected per winter depends highly on the number of +0C days in the winter. Your average temperature might only go from -11C to -10C, but if there are 20 additional +0C days, you might end up with a lot less snow cover.
The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.
Where I am at, in the Canadian Rockies, the daily temperature this winter was routinely 7-9 degrees Celsius above average (1970-2020) according to my iOS Weather app. They introduced this feature last year and I have been checking it nearly every day. Other than a cold snap in January (that killed my bees!) the weather was warmer every single day.
You're hitting on another issue we gardeners are noticing - overall the temps are warmer, causing things to bud early, but there are still cold snaps. The cold snaps aren't any colder than they should be for the time of year, the problem is the inter-snap days are a lot warmer. This increased variance in temperature is actually worse than the average temperature getting warmer.
> but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer.
The George W. Bush administration (e.g. via Frank Luntz) advocated for the term "climate change" because Republican strategists wanted to leverage perceived uncertainty about global warming as much as possible.[0]
This is a PR effort that seems to have largely succeeded (both in adoption and its goals) and it's unfortunate that when we are literally talking about warming we adopt a term that is less precise; you are talking about global warming here.
This is an odd telling of history because the term climate change was also pushed by the scientific community as a more precise alternative because people didn't grasp how global warming could make some places colder with larger temperature swings in both directions.
It's conflating two things, Luntz and Republicans at the time did want to push a narrative of uncertainty surrounding greenhouse gas emissions and they wanted to switch terminology in a pro-environmental move because of the existing connotations surrounding global warming and "environmentalists" made it hard to get any Republican support.
You're not going to gain support/understanding for something, from people who have made up their minds, simply by changing the name of the thing. The same people who were sending chain E-mails in the 90s that said "How could it be Global Warming if it's so cold outside! LOL" are now posting Facebook memes that say "Duh, Climate has always been Changing!" Any new name someone gives it will be equally ridiculed, because its opponents don't care what it's called.
No, it's an educational product. It is a walkthrough explaining the context and meaning of the map for those poor, ignorant people who don't know everything already. All you have to do to dismiss it forever is click a single button, "explore map", which is always on the top left of the screen.
It's a gentle - and to my eyes effective - introduction and overview on a topic many people have heard about but most have probably not really read or considered further. It wasn't just meant to be a "look at old vs. new map" - it had a lot more context and information than that compiled for personal relevance and easy of understanding.
It’s an educational product. A product where someone looks at masses of data, pulls out the salient points and presents them directly. Why would most people want to go to a site with csv files for weather data in every zip code?
Yes, and the complaint is that news should be about informing, not about entertaining to make people feel informed [0]. This is more infotainment than information.
[0] This concept implemented at scale by Roger Ailes, founder of Fox news, who famously said "Our viewers don't want be informed, they want to feel informed", which became the motto of the newsroom
The article provides useful context about how much the hardiness grades have changed, where, and why; it provides context about what these ratings do and don’t mean; it adds context about other climate changes that aren’t captured in this data; and it frames it with advice about planting, underpinned by a visually interesting data plot, and a tool that allows you to explore that data in a way that makes it personally relevant to you.
Why on earth would you choose an article like this to jump on a hobby horse about infotainment?
I found it only marginally informative, the "interactive" map didn't work as well as I expected, and overall I found it disappointingly info-tainment-ish.
I would not have said anything, but seeing the prior two comment, I responded to add something; sorry you found it disappointing, but my intent was not to "jump on a hobby horse about infotainment".
Did you already know that these ‘hardiness’ climate zones are only based on mean winter minimum temperature? They say nothing about drought prevalence, peak heat, or the timing, frequency and duration of cold snaps?
If you did, well, sure, this probably wouldn’t have been very informative. But for anyone for whom all that was news, this is pretty good information - and in particular is valuable context over and above just a raw map of the zones.
Yes, I did know that, and I did scroll down to the bottom. Even though it contained some good information, I just thought it was presented in a way that excessively got in the way of actually understanding and using the info, and that the graphic presentation was lame, just A:B with a very constrained and poorly working city-picker box (said enter city, wouldn't work or even give an error message unless you entered only one of the cities they actually had in their list, so should have been presented as a drop-down, not a free-entry box), didn't show the areas where there were differences vs stayed in the same zone, etc. etc. etc.
Just looking at the map doesn't tell you what hardiness zone means or how to apply (and not apply) this knowledge. I would say it makes you feel informed by teaching you a piece of trivia ("I'm in zone 8a") without actually informing you by giving you the tools to use what you've learned.
==without actually informing you by giving you the tools to use what you've learned==
The title of the article doesn't imply that it will teach you how to implement. The title explicitly states it is a map to show you the shift in zones, and it does that very clearly.
It worked for me sewhat after I understood the interaction and was somehow nice UX (I agree that there is better option for immediately better usability) However, I think even considering UX, there are clearly interaction hints missing to encourage the scrolling interaction in the first place. Secondly, it makes it really hard to find information again after reading it once sequentially. A menu type thing would probably fix that as well.
Even once I got to the end I couldn't actually use the map because the left side of it (with the legend and year-switcher) was off-screen :) best web design A++
Thank you, that page was chock-full of everything except information.
On a side note, why is it always that maps of phenomena that respect no political boundaries, tend to be cut off at the borders? It's absurd to me, and it happens so often. Even if you're an American, and only care about American Americanism, you'd still benefit from seeing how things play out beyond these arbitrary borderlines.
Does anyone else HATE pages like this? Just show me the damn map and not 5 different pop up overlays, many animated, depending on how hard scrolled down I am.
Oh, and their "zip code" search is broken, it takes me to the state capital over a hundred miles away, in a totally different climactic zone. Doubly broken.
99.9% of web search forms that ask for a city accept a zip code, and are often more accurate when doing so, as even a mid sized city can be composed of dozens of zip codes, never mind places like Central Manhattan where some zipcodes resolve all the way down to single buildings.
...but this page is part of the 0.1% (by your math) that actually wants what it asked for. So, this is just a case of user error. Enter what it asked for and it works great.
Harrison Township, Michigan goes to Harrison City, PA. I then tried the city to the south - Saint Clair Shores, MI and that took me to San Antonio, Texas. I'm working in East China, Michigan and that took me to East Chicago, Indiana. I ended up just using Detroit, MI to get anything useful. So, no, that doesn't work either.
NPR could have spent every single taxpayer dollar they received for the year on this one project and it would still be a rounding error on the national budget.
Winters almost do not exist here in the mid-Atlantic. Sure, there are some cold snaps, but they do not last as long as 20 to 30 years ago. Snowfall? Getting less and less with an occasional nor'easter here and there.
Ancedotally, in late February, I had to mow the lawn.
We've started measuring TTFF. (Time-to-first-frost). Historically, it was in early to mid October for decades. Now it's pushing mid-November. The growing seasons are longer, for sure.
Here in quasi-coastal NC, I'm down to maybe 10 days a year wearing long pants. It got up to 71F New Years Day this year, and February had days in the 80s (and none below freezing). There's basically pollen season, summer, fall, repeat. It doesn't seem to be much colder, if at all, in January than November. i barely ever see my breath.
Not at all how it was in the exact town 35 years ago as a kid. It wasn't frigid, even then, but we had a real Winter season where it would consistently stay cold for 3-4 months.
Now, even though it can get cold, it seems like you have a "nice day" weekend at least once a month.
here in louisiana it's snowed 3 times in the last 11 years. It routinely will go several days at a hard freeze. It very nearly is always at or below freezing at night. I have a CSV of 5-minute granularity temperatures going back several years (at least 5 years).
It's gotten to freezing in southern california, in that decade, as well - at night. Growing up there, it never did, but around 2002 or so it got to 30 one night. I have friends in the PNW, utah, colorado, texas. The US has a long cycle, and listening to people who have either moved around a lot or not been alive for more than 1 cycle is funny to me.
I enjoy talking to old timers, especially about nature. Prior to 2021, the year everyone made fun of Texans, there was 1 large freeze in the early or mid 2000s, where ice formed on power lines and broke the lines. Prior to that, it hadn't happened for at least 30 years to anyone's recollection.
Oh, and i live in a sub-tropical rainforest. It rained exactly 5" this weekend - i just went and checked. I comment a lot about the weather on my boring facebook account, so i can see all the times it's rained more than an inch or two - or where rain was predicted but didn't appear.
Come summertime, when it's "the hottest ever recorded", there will be different arguments from one side, as usual.
Hardiness zones are about the minimum temperature. This doesn't impact annuals, but perennial crops such as fruit trees, the minimum is the most important metric. It doesn't matter if you hit -3 degrees (for example) once a decade, or once a year, it will kill your orchard.
> Winters almost do not exist here ... Snowfall? Getting less and less with an occasional nor'easter here and there.
That seems like a regional saying, which translates very poorly to an online global audience. I read winters almost do not exist and assumed you were being more literal than "there's less snow".
It's snowed here 2-3 times in the last couple decades, each time for maybe a minute or two. I still wouldn't say we don't have a winter. For this area, winter is when it rains. Which is different than summer because there's no rain in the summer, almost ever (maybe one day on average as freak weather).
Edit: I seem to have struck a nerve here, but I'm not sure why noting that a particular turn of phrase might be confusing to people from other areas would do so.
My point was that in some areas they equate winter with snow, and reduction of snow seems to be interpreted as no winter. If the weather patter is still notably different than summer, it's winter. Equating snow in the current area to winter and lack of it to not being winter is a regional thing. It makes certain statements, like "winters almost do not exist here" come across very differently to people in other regions, which what what I was trying to express.
For example, my initial interpretation of your early statements in that comment was that you were saying there's little difference between fall and spring from winter, that your winters don't have a noticeable difference to the other seasons. From the rest of your comment it sounds like it's just somewhat milder than it used to be, but still notably different weather pattern.
When this new map was first released, it was very amusing watching people in gardening Facebook groups start planning to grow plants that have died whenever they tried in the past. Just because the government gave them a new number, they think it suddenly changed the reality on the ground.
I grow 25+ kinds of fruit and I’d love to add more. But the reality is that fruits like figs and muscadines still die every winter where I am at.
I wish the US had a similar "bug zone". Where I live has seen a whole slew of bugs that did not exist beyond several states South making it all the way up here over the last decade and a half.
I havn't seen maps for bugs in general. But there are some maps the track specific bugs. Like I check for maps regarding ticks. They are getting farther and farther north.
The worst excesses of "modern" web presentation, coupled with a complete lack of actual gardening info...I'm completely baffled. 1% "here's your zone", and 99% "your zone is almost no use for gardening"
100% this! I thought that the website was just broken under Safari, it was only when I tried it in Chrome that I accidentally scrolled and discovered that actually it did work in Safari after all.
Because it was initially divided into 13 zones. In 1990 they subdivided each zone into a and b zones.
I'm not finding any rationale on why subdividing instead of renumbering, but it probably alleviated confusion at the time. If you're in zone 6b, but you're used to thinking of yourself as zone 6, you're still mostly right even if you forget whether you're in a or b. Easier to remember than suddenly you're in zone 13.
Isn’t it the exact opposite? If it just says zone 6, it’s the old system because no a or b suffix.
If the number space got doubled zone 6 would still exist but mean something completely different now. You can’t tell if it’s the old or new system at all because the first numbers all got re-used but with different meaning.
The Plant Hardiness Zone Map (PHZM) is based on the average annual extreme minimum winter temperature, displayed as 10-degree F zones ranging from zone 1 (coldest) to zone 13 (warmest). Each zone is divided into half zones designated as ‘a’ and ‘b’. For example, 7a and 7b are 5-degree F increments representing the colder and warmer halves of zone 7, respectively.
I suspect due to colder weather and because of more erraticness. We've had some colder stretches and we're now experiencing more sudden cold snaps deeper into Spring. Latter situation especially bad if a plant is coming out of dormancy and then experiences freezing temperatures.
I was excited to see this and the changes that occurred, but this "map" is one of those preachy hyperinteractive visual storytelling scrollslop things that the likes of NYT routinely creates.
Anyone have a link to the actual map of the zone changes without the interactive TikTok experience?
It is very nice to see US-targeted media use F. All climate related news seems to use C and I'd bet that 95%+ of Americans don't know 2 degrees C = 3.6 degrees F. So most Americans are underestimating the effects of climate change by almost a factor of 2. And those are the ones that believe in it.
I think the US should move to SI but as long as we haven't (and have actually taken steps backwards during the Bush administration) as far as I am concerned it is journalistic malpractice if not active disinformation to report temperature changes in C in US media.
> F is a much better unit than C for everyday use.
People say this, and it confuses me.
Basically the only difference between the two is the absolute numbers and the resolution.
Regarding resolution, for me the difference between, say 22 C and 23 C isn’t consistently noticeable - it depends on what I’m wearing, my recent activity level, humidity, etc. having a finer resolution - i.e. between 72 and 73 F isn’t that useful. That is to say, I’d change my plans if it were say 8 C outside instead of 18 C, but I wouldn’t if it were 17 instead of 18.
Regarding absolute numbers - sure with Fahrenheit you don’t need to use negative numbers as much, but apparently you still need to across much of the US, and dealing with negative numbers is… fine? Having generally smaller numbers (i.e. most of Earth has natural temperatures of - 40 to +40) is probably better? And having that obvious distinction of when water freezes makes some sense maybe?
I honestly don’t thing either is particularly better for everyday use, it’s just that a lot of people are habituated to one or the other.
F is nice b/c it's pretty much on a 0-100 scale. 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot. Anything below 0 or about 100 is pretty much death without proper care.
The corresponding range for C is -50C to +50C which covers virtually all human experience. 20-25C is typical indoor comfortable temperature. And veering from it either above or below makes things uncomfortable. 0C is freezing, below which hypothermia risk increases rapidly.
> but apparently you still need to across much of the US, and dealing with negative numbers is… fine?
Honestly, you don't really need to, at least on a day-to-day basis. I grew up somewhere where it got <0F every year for like a week at a time. You will just colloquially refer to it as "below zero" which roughly translates into "yea f** that, we aren't going outside".
The only time I ever really remembered distinguishing between degrees below 0 was midwestern trash talk between e.g. IL, WI, MN, and ND. (If I remember correctly, ND wins on wind chill)
I've used C all my life, but moved to the US lately and trying to start using F.
Probably the easiest measurement change to get used to. There's very little difference in actual practice.
C makes it easier to reason regarding freezing/boiling - it's simpler to think about if it's going to snow by relating it to 0 then 32. But that's about the only difference in day to day use I can think of.
I haven't heard any reason to prefer F over C however (unlike Feet for example).
> Probably the easiest measurement change to get used to.
here is a counter-anecdotal evidence I moved to the US 25 years ago, still hate F with passion
I gave it a serious go. After trying to get used to F for 20-some years, I went back and set all my thermometers and online weather maps to Celsius.
Farenheit is an absurdly bad scale choice. It is needlessly granular for everyday use and feels wholly arbitrary.
32 degrees is freezing, so how far is 19 F from freezing? 32-19 ... ummm 13 degrees and that is as far as 32+19 ... ummm 51 degrees ... what are we talking about? -10 and +10 Celsius ...
I still don't know if 120F would burn my hands or not, if 150 F scalds or not. I have no sense about temperatures above 100F (and that one only because it is a threshold for fever)
I use both F and C (I grew up exclusively using F, but now I have a lot of experience with both), and I prefer C.
It's more handy for cold weather because freezing is 0° (which is way less awkward than 32°), and it's more handy for cooking because boiling is 100° (which is way less awkward than 212°).
It's also nice that the human body temperature is a round 37° (rather than 98.6°).
For warmer weather, F and C are about the same to me. It's easy to remember that 20°C is perfect, 30°C is hot, and 40°C is miserable — just as it is easy to remember the equivalent 70°F, 85°F, and 100°F.
So I have found that C is better for day-to-day use, even though it's not what I grew up with and I have drastically less experience with it. All I needed was a little time to get used to it.
It’s only boiling at sea level. See, this is why it’s such a poor unit. It relies on a rare environmental condition. Fine for the lab but not everyday use.
Having lived in regions that use both, I have to say that there’s not much difference in everyday experience once you’ve gotten used to it. I don’t think I’d like to be dealing with Kelvin (the actual SI temperature unit) on an everyday basis, though. Or maybe I’d get used to it just as easily as switching between C and F.
Gardening isn't for everyone. You are completely allowed to have your own opinions ! Although perhaps we have a gap in our language here, since you seem to be against growing vegetables/herbs exclusively rather than what I'd call gardening which includes growing all plants, flowers, etc. Having a 'nice' looking garden (or at least one where you can sit comfortably) is the outcome of that sort of gardening.
There are very few vegetables where growing them makes yourself much sense (economically). There are a few where you can 'fire and forget' basically, but even then it's a up-to few hours preparing the soil. In my climate zone, mint would be one - it's basically a weed, so it will grow and spread by itself.
Also - you can't get Basil in store where you are? In the UK and Germany it's available either as fresh leaves, or as small plants costing about probably $1-2 each.
I can see how it stopped being fun for you. No problem, go do something else you enjoy. I personally love to go out into the garden and just be there. I trimmed some branches yesterday because it needed doing but I didn’t go out there to do a chore. I went out because it was beautiful and I wanted to be there.
I make a lot of money too and can work whenever. But taking frequent breaks keeps me sharp. I think better when I have some breaks and a few minutes in the garden is refreshing. I’m actually getting more into growing food. I have some ginger sprouting on my counter and can’t wait to find a home for it in the yard. The plum trees are captivating, we had a spectacular apple year last year. There’s something calm and sweet about going out to the tree, picking apples and turning them into a pie.
To each his own though. I’d never push my hobbies on someone else or challenge anyone who started to find one of theirs unfulfilling.
I've found that growing heirloom tomatos is essentially effort-free; they keep coming back year after year without me having to do anything but pick them before the rats get to them. That "garden" is basically just a weed patch that makes free food.
Fruit is an area where growing is typically more economical than buying. I have found that berries in particular are absurdly easy to grow in large quantities (if you are in the right climate) yet very expensive to buy from a shop.
Yes, we all love it when people share the smug superior feelings on why they think how someone else spends their time is beneath them.
Sportsball people love to make fun of the "nerds" dressing up in costume like their favorite character and get together once every so often at a con of some sort, yet totally ignore the fact that their fellow sportsball fans dress up in body paint with no shirts or other costume of cheese hats or viking hats or whatever on a weekly basis (maybe biweekly if they only do home games).
The whole concept of mine is better than yours is exactly what people love to read on a monday morning, so I and others thank you for your valueless contribution to start our day.
Maybe it doesn’t affect your personal gardening habits - but in terms of effect on commercial agriculture I think of the effects there too. More work for farmers to figure out yield optimization (new schedules, changed techniques), more work from pests moving into new areas that were formerly blocked by seasonal cold. It’s a driver of increased cost pressure on foods you will want to buy.
My wife and I spent a few years with a few acres of land in Ireland and went hard on gardening, at one point providing all of our veg ourselves. But now that we've left we don't miss it. It was fun while it was novel, though, and our kids learned a lot about where food comes from, which is nice.
It also tends to involve a huge amount of plastic, weirdly, and pests are a big issue.
I think the vast majority of plastic use happens before the consumer sees the product.
I remember seeing my first pallet wrapper. It’s very cool but there’s a lot of plastic there. (Check out this vid starting at 43s: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TzqSEKCj0Po)
Out of curiosity, how did a large garden involve lots of plastic?
I wasn't even thinking of consumer-facing or transport plastics, I just meant what's used during growing.
To start, you put black plastic on the ground to block light and kill off grass, weeds, etc.. Then there's plastic plant "fabric" on the plants at night to keep them warm, then plastic netting over plants to stop birds from eating the berries, and of course the polytunnel (called a hoop houses in some places) itself is made of thick plastic, and it will break down over time due to UV. All of this plastic degrades and turns in to microplastics in the environment.
It's tiny by comparison but I always found it annoying that a strimmer is designed to just throw entire spools of plastic in to your garden one tiny piece at a time.
Gardening is a link in the chain of land maintenance most places. I.e. where you want plants for erosion control, or blocking an ugly view, or especially fighting other plants away, etc. maybe that's 'landscaping' 'arborculture' etc but by that token so is food gardening 'agriculture'
