USDA updates zones map, reflecting changes many growers are already seeing

Farmers and gardeners adapt to shifting seasons and wetter springs

By Lauren Yates

Farmer Tom Tucker sat on the bed of his red truck on May 29 – a day when, in most years, he and his brothers would usually be planting large swaths of seed potatoes. But this year, they were “watching the wind,” waiting for the soil to dry.

Their family farm in Gabriels, Tucker Farms, had just soaked up two inches of rain in two days. Potatoes can usually only tolerate that much rain in a week, Tucker said. But springs and summers have been wetter in Gabriels, one of the coldest locations in New York state. And over the last few years, and it’s cut down on their yield.

Longtime gardeners and farmers in the Adirondacks are adjusting to problems cropping up around the last few growing seasons – drastic temperature swings in late winter that can kill bee hives, wetter springs and summers that can delay or thwart planting, increased winds, “freak frosts” that prey on newly-planted transplants after weeks of warm May weather, and extended periods of warm weather in the fall. Last year, plumes of smoke from Canadian wildfires created a haze over the Adirondacks that stunted sun-loving plants. 

Changes in growing zones

Florence Sears, a longtime Essex County Master Gardener who’s cultivated her piece of land in Crown Point since childhood, calls these trends the “perfect storm” of events caused by climate change. 

Changing gardening trends in the Adirondacks are reflected in the updated U.S. Department of Agriculture’s newest Hardiness Zone map that was released this past fall, the first update to the map since 2012. The 2023 hardiness map identifies gardening “zones” using a 30-year average of cold weather, between 1991 and 2020, taken from thousands of weather stations across the country. These zones tell gardeners which plants will best survive the cold in their area and range from Zone 1 – the coldest – to the warmest Zone 13. 

The average coldest temperature in most areas of the Adirondack region has climbed between 1 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit  since the last map in 2012, which used cold temperature averages between 1976 and 2005. 

More to Explore

• No small potatoes for this Adirondack farm family
• Mayfield farmer is betting on solar
• How big is too big? Small farms lay bare the struggles they face
• A new crop of farmers
• Champlain Valley farmers branch out
• The key to farming in the Adirondacks? Resiliency

Photo of Wild Work Farm in Keene by Eric Teed

Paul Casson, site manager at the University of Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center field station at Whiteface Mountain, said his station has seen winter lows shifting up in recent years, with fewer clear nights and more cloud cover. Those clouds insulate the local climate, he said, creating warmer winter temperatures.

“The lows are creeping up faster than the highs,” he said.

Some areas in the Adirondack Park have shifted gardening zones since the 2012 map. A patch in the central Adirondacks, including Indian Lake, Newcomb, North Hudson and Minerva, has shifted from Zone 4a to the warmer Zone 4b. Black Brook and AuSable Forks in the northern Adirondacks have shifted from Zone 4b to 5a. 

But gardeners all across the region are reporting the effects of warming temperatures on their growing season. Sears said she was already wrapping up her asparagus harvest at the end of May this year – the time of year when, in the past, her harvest was usually just beginning. 

“I’m three weeks ahead,” she said.

The coldest spots in the Adirondacks

One exception is in Gabriels, where the average coldest temperature dropped by 1 degree F from the 2012 hardiness map to 2023 map. Gabriels and the Lake Clear areas are notoriously among the coldest places in the contiguous U.S., located in a bowl-shaped valley where cold air tends to pool. 

Dana Fast, a famed Master Gardener living in Lake Clear, remembers that it was difficult to grow most tomatoes – her favorite crop – when she moved here from Syracuse in the 1970s. When the USDA’s hardiness map came into widespread use around 1990, using weather data from between 1974 to 1986, her garden was in Zone 3. That’s an average coldest temperature between -40 degrees F and -30 degrees F. 

Lake Clear has been in Zone 4a since the 2012 hardiness map was released, and it appears to be the only place in the Park where average coldest temperatures haven’t risen in the new map. But Fast, who is now 93 and retired from gardening, said she was able to plant more and more tomatoes as the years bore on. She kept detailed gardening and weather journals that showed ground thaws moving from April in the 1990s up to March and even February in recent years.

But Fast said she’s seen the effects of climate change take a stronger hold here in the last few years, since she stopped gardening. She said she wishes she could garden now to take advantage of the warmer seasons.

“But the climate changed me, too,” she said.

Weather data informs the map

There has been an uptick in weather stations in the Adirondacks since the state Mesonet, now a network of 126 weather stations that includes at least one station in each Adirondack county, was established in 2014. But Mesonet Operations Director Nathan Bain told the Explorer that the USDA’s 2023 map didn’t use data from the state Mesonet – in fact, he said it looks like the Adirondacks’ 2023 data came from the same stations used to make the 2012 map.

However, Bain said the Mesonet signed an agreement last month to share its data with the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University, which compiles data for the USDA map. The state Mesonet will likely contribute weather data to the next hardiness zone map, according to Bain. And next week, the Uihlein Farm in Lake Placid is unveiling its new Mesonet weather station, the first expansion of the Mesonet since 2018. 

Image at top courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture