When it comes to starting a garden or planting in general, there are several zone maps that help determine which plants would thrive/survive in a specific location. You may have seen this number on plants you’ve purchased and never realized that plants are designated by a hardiness number that correlates to this zone.
Hardiness of plants describes their ability to survive adverse growing conditions. We’d like to break down how hardiness is assessed in zoning and the effect on plant selection.
Hardiness takes into consideration the minimum average temperature that a location experiences and then in 10 degree increments those are alloted into 13 zones. Those 13 zones are further broken down into zone A and zone B in 5 degree increments.
For example, Sacramento, California is Zone 9 (along with certain parts of Arizona, Texas, and Florida) with an average minimum temperature of 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit. Previously, most zip codes in Sac, were classified as zone 9a averaging closer to 20-25 degrees, but were recently rezoned to zone 9b as the average minimum temperature has grown to 25-30 degrees.
In contrast, drive two hours to Reno, Nevada and you jump two zones below Sacramento to zone 7 with an average minimum temperature of 0-10 degrees.
http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/Downloads.aspx
Why is this important to us? Well, we headed out to California Beer Farm to start planting for the spring and we tried to be conscious of what will flourish in our specific climate.
Our desire is to maintain a direct link between our farms and the products that we ferment, so this opportunity to work with a local farm is amazing.
We planted four flats of cherry bomb peppers that our good friend Eric started in his greenhouse, several varieties of berries (boysenberry, blueberries and blackberries), a couple of society garlic plants, onions, regular garlic, and lots of seeds: lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, radishes, herbs and basil.
Before we know it, hopefully we will have a plethora of produce that we can ferment into all kinds of creations.
