March: Snowstorm

2. March 2017

Planted: A Year of Gardening
The series starts here

The unusually warm 2017 spring ensured that all the plants thrived both in the breezeway and outside next to the house; I retrieved the diaspora plants, and all of the shrubs started sprouting, although the new redbud kept us biting our nails well into May.

March in Chicago is “extended season” time. A lot of people go through all kinds of hoops (literally–they build hoop houses) to eek out an extra few weeks of planting time. In my experience, for home gardeners this gives you maybe an additional week’s worth of growth: the plants do grow earlier, but slowly because it’s cold even in a hoop house this time of year, and there’s just not enough sunlight. If you plant in a hoop house in March, you’ll have great looking peas by June 1. However, if you plant in the open bed the first week of May, you’ll have great looking peas by June 1.

Then, just as we had decided it was spring, and planted out a few things, it decided it actually was winter after all, and dumped a load of snow and a week of unseasonal cold. Chicago didn’t get as slammed as the east coast, but we still ended up with more than 8 inches of snow in two very lovely falls over two days. Not too cold, and the streets were cleared pretty fast, although oddly, even though seriously this was not a bad storm, traffic shut down.

Plants adapted to a Northern Illinois winter actually need the snow. While I don’t think we had a precipitation deficit, because it came down as rain, snow can act as winter “mulch,” protecting roots. Winter rain also doesn’t do much to hydrate the ground—because the ground is mostly frozen, it just runs off. Snow, which melts more slowly than rain comes down, has a chance to seep into the soil, keeping roots and seeds moist.

It was the most snow-free winter in more than 100 years, with not a single snowflake from Christmas to this March storm. Can’t really complain after a winter like this. (Don’t worry, complaints coming for the most miserable April and May in years.) Since I hadn’t actually gotten to see my garden in the snow, because there was no snow in January and February, this was kind of nice. And since in March you know it’s only going to last a few days, especially March in a warm year, I figured this was it (although the joke was on me).