wwwp.dailyclimate.org - 3/23/2009
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Daily Climate: As winter retreats northward across the nation, gardeners are cleaning tools and turning attention to spring planting. But climate change is adding a new wrinkle, and now a standard reference – the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Plant Hardiness Zone Map – is about to ...
garden.org - 3/17/2009
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garden.org —
USDA Hardiness Zone Finder The USDA Hardiness Zone
Map divides North America into 11 separate zones; each
zone is 10°F warmer (or colder) in an average winter than the adjacent zone. If you see a hardiness zone in a catalog or plant description, ...
(more)
National Gardening Association :: National Gardening ...
reuters.com - 3/26/2009
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reuters.com —
Reuters: The Conservation Reserve, which pays owners to
idle fragile U.S. farmland, could become one of the
largest carbon sequestration programs on private land, an Agriculture Department official said on Wednesday. Some farm-state lawmakers say ...
(more)
Idled U.S. farmland may be large carbon sink: USDA
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What's Happening OnEarth- Monday, March 23
Greenlight | OnEarth Magazine, from NRDC —
... The USDA has been revising its Plant Hardiness Zone Map--used by "anyone involved with gardening, especially with perennials...to pick the right plants for their location”--and it will "make very clear how much rising temperatures have shifted planting zones northward." [The Daily Climate] ...
New Hardiness Zones on the Way
Garden Rant —
... . And of course the USDA denied that the new map was rejected for political reasons. Well, the USDA's just about ready to release a revision they DO approve of, as reported in Via the Daily Climate. In that article Tony Avent is quoted criticizing the rejected map because it moved the zones too far southward - apparently moving Chicago from Zone 5b to Zone 6. Says Avent: “In 2004 Chicago had a -21º winter. If Chicago gardeners had planted zone 6 plants, they would all have failed. When plants die customers give up gardening, and that’s the nursery business’s worst ...
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