Southern Secrets: Working With Our Crazy Climate

Understanding Our Southern Climate

I promised you Sunday readers I'd share things I'm working on for the new book. I started with a good system but everything got bumpy as a too-old-yellow squash. I don’t talk about the bumps so much but follow on my Instagram, and you’ll see the barn roof (first of two) we’re rebuilding and storm-gnarled trees yet to be cleaned up. There’s a little issue of some old-man medical stuff to deal with, too, plus life, supper, puppies, and papers to smooth out.

But I’m getting back to the book. It’s sort of a "Secrets of Southern Gardens" and sort of "Myth-Busting Heretic" book. It's aimed at new gardeners and new Southerners, but hopefully with some good stuff for experienced gardeners, too.

Many of us learned gardening the wrong way - we learned things that other people believed, and the internet presents as gospel. But you know those things just aren't necessarily true.

I want to rip through some of that baloney to keep new gardeners from learning things they'll later have to unlearn.

Here's an introduction from the chapter on understanding the relationships between plants and our erratic climate. The chapter goes on to explain the USDA Zone system, which is useful but only one of the various systems and definitely not the holy grail that many of us were taught.