A humid continental climate (Köppen prefix D and a third letter of a or b) is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, which is typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters.
Where was spring? Where were the days we rolled up our tshirt sleeves in April to begin working on our farmers’ tans? Each morning I’d don a short sleeve tee in hopeless optimism….then a long sleeve tee...and a pullover fleece. The aborigines have their three dog nights, but we marked the April calendar with X after X of three shirt days. Most springs, the first optimistic tomato customer will call soon after April Fool's (coincidence, no doubt), but even the most Pollyanna-ish gardener will save their ammo when the morning low is 19 degrees. Snow? Unpleasant and messy, but not unheard of. Frost in May: economically damaging and a monkey wrench in any delivery schedule. But NINETEEN DEGREES? “Always winter and never Christmas”, C.S. Lewis would say.
Continental Climate
noun. a climate characterized by hot summers, cold winters, and little rainfall, typical of the interior of a continent. Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers.
It snowed. It snowed Palm Sunday. Well, that can happen: we noted, with bravado, that March was just going out like a lion. It snowed again, the next weekend, while we were purportedly hosting our annual Open House. Nary a customer braved the roads, but Mark and Laura and Grandma Millie and Grandpa Charlie came to drink lemonade (!) and eat cookies for the kids’ sakes. ‘Cause nothing can really warm you like a cold glass of lemonade.
The next weekend it got serious. Though most of our customers told us to hold their plants until it warmed, some sales have no “rain date”. Necessity being the mother of inventions, we improvised, leaving the tender veggies in the heated houses overnight and swathing every cart in shrink wrap to keep the warmth and moisture from dissipating. An electric heater kept the semi and the Isuzu above freezing several nights. The gaps in the trailers were even sealed with duct tape so the windchill couldn’t sneak in. The first morning the temperature was above forty degrees, we almost broke out the t-shirts.
https://weather.com/.../2018-06-06-may-2018-record-hot-temperatures-united-states-n...
Jun 6, 2018 - May 2018 was the hottest of any May in 124 years of recording keeping for the continental United States, eclipsing the extreme heat of that ..
With a flip of the calendar page, frozen April morphed into blistering May. It was so hot, water from a hose blanched flowers in an instant. It was so hot, hostas bleached and the daffodils that had waited patiently through the freezes around Easter sighed and bowed out for the season. The wind was a scirocco, sucking the moisture from foliage, flower, and soil. A common refrain was, “Well, I won’t have to mow again!”
One of the few crops that shrugged its shoulders at this schizophrenic weather was the hardy hibiscus. The hoodlum autumn glory clematis perished in wholesale quantities in my yard, surviving only in the canopy of a century old lilac; the lackadaisical butterfly bushes fainted dead away...literally….but for one pair of leaves I’m fostering like a spark in the darkness. And while the so called “hardy” grasses never broke “dormancy”, leaving behind a thicket of rapier sharp blades for the unlucky gardener to penetrate and dispose of, the hibiscus ignored, as is their wont, the entire frigid calendar page of April, and then, sensing the blaze of May, stretched underground, and shot to the surface to take a look around.
Now it’s July and the hibiscus are nodding their giant heads in approval over this hot state of affairs. And so are their potted friends, lined out in rows of ruby and green down by the sweet corn patch. Some of them are blooming: the vibrant Midnight Marvel and silvery Mocha Moon, each blossom lasting but a day. From cuttings to a three gallon pot is a mere six weeks; but even if you can’t SEE the hibiscus growing, you could certainly MEASURE it day by day….By the end of the summer, the roots are as thick as your fingers and anchored so deeply in the soil beneath the ground cloth that they must be cut with pruners. But don’t wait that long: plant these voracious growers now while they can still be unpotted without trauma to either plant or gardener and enjoy their flower power for the rest of summer, however hot, wet, dry, or...continental….. it may be…
As for me, it’s off to sleep before another July morning of watering lines of asters and mums, praying for cooler evenings for them to set buds…then an afternoon loading hibiscus, the flower that says….Let’s DO the Continental!
