Okay, one of the largest sections of FarmHomestead is the Garden Calendar. I have looked at it so many times I am sick of looking at it. So I was wondering what other peoples’ garden calendars look like, and I found one that just CRACKED me up… this guy (Eric Walker) is fun to read. He says…
It is vital to understand that nature is not a factory, with timetables and a noon whistle: dates for doing things in a vegetable garden are, even for the greatest experts, at best guesstimates based on prior experience that may not be–often is not–applicable to this season.
The weather data used for typical temperatures and such is the fifty-year data from the State weather-data-collecting station in Ritzville, Washington (State), which is a cool U.S.D.A. Zone 6a, very near to the map line separating it from 5b.
As we say on the Introduction page of this site, it is important to avoid worshiping at the altar of “Zone”, because a Zone number does not tell anyone much of anything about a place save the typical coldest winter temperature; places with the same Zone number can have seriously different climates. The Ritzville climate is, we think, pretty representative–as to temperatures, anyway, even if not necessarily rainfall–of a great many places in the United States. We imagine that the information on this site is useful, with only minor common-sense modification, to anyone living from Zone 4 to Zone 7, inclusive, and that sure takes in a lot of territory.
His is more of a planting schedule and it is a very handy one. You should check it out at A home gardener’s calendar: what to do when .
Also, if you live in his area, he has amassed some terrifically helpful information for you. As he points out…
But as we began working on plans for our new vegetable garden–which, our being vegetarians, would be very important to us — we discovered that the seeming wealth of information available on the internet and in gardening books has some major gaps. The first of those gaps is information specific to our location, which is the northwest “inter-mountain” area between the Rockies and the coastal Cascades, more particularly the Columbia River Basin; that location is in the Pacific Northwest, but virtually all references to “the Pacific Northwest” in a gardening context will turn out to apply exclusively to the coastal rim, which has a maritime climate strikingly different from that east of the Cascades.
Eric runs a number of interesting websites, in fact, he reminds me of me and I don’t know how he finds the time to keep up… The site is called Growing Taste It gets a bunch of green tomatoes.
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