I got to writing a response to a thread and it turned into a long winded off-topic affair, so I copied it to a Google doc instead. That happens a lot with me on forums, I get to writing and can’t stop and end up drifting far from the subject, so I decided to do this instead.
I obscured the author of the post that started this rambling because I set the file to “anyone with the link” and I may post this same thing on other sites.
Anyway, in case you’re interested Reed’s Ramblings # 1
I’m in western Illinois zone 6a, which not long ago used to be zone 5b. My observations agree with yours, Mark. Our growing season just abruptly ended on November 24, nearly a month later than usual. Our summer was also hot and dry. Rains when they came were decent, sometimes torrential, but the moisture soon evaporated with dry winds that followed. I’m starting to feel like I’m living in central California except that it gets a lot colder here for periods that don’t last the entire winter. Like you described.
Last winter it got down to -25 which is very unusually cold for around here. Peoples furnaces were failing right around Christmas during that cold snap. At some point we had about three weeks of time with a couple feet of snow on the ground. Yet paradoxically temperatures were often above freezing and sometimes far above freezing for days at a time leading to the snow melting and ground thawing out. A real rollercoaster winter.
Those cold snaps were also accompanied by winds that dried out the ground. Last winter i grew spinach under row cover to protect it from the extremes of cold and particularly of dryness, and that worked well.